If you’ve been following the January PFRE twilight contest you will recognize this photo as Jason Roehner’s entry in January’s contest. I got several requests asking about how Jason did this shot so I asked Jason for the story behind this photo.
Jason and his friend Andrea Calo from Austin, TX, setup and shot the photo as follows:
Since this 14,000 square foot home in North Scottsdale had a lot of ground to cover, we split the work so that she would shoot the yard/pool area/patios, and I photographed the house from an adjacent street to get an overview of the entire property, apparently modeled to look like a small mountainside Italian village. We showed up with a lot of lights, all real basic Smith-Victor photo floods in 500, 250, and 100 watts, and several reels of extension cords. We spent about an hour setting up about 14 lights in the yard (here is the diagram of where the lights were), the motor court, courtyard, driveway, and sunken wash around the house. Then it was just a matter of timing and shooting.
With using all that constant light meant there was little post-production to do. In raw conversion I lightened the surrounding land with an adjustment brush and toned down the bright sconce lights on the home. In photoshop I masked in a brighter sky since it was a somewhat overcast night, and was asked to remove the foundation construction behind the home.
Jason, thanks for the setup info! Interesting photo!
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.