I’ve just returned from my annual summer shoot with Landcrafters of Milwaukee, a landscape architecture firm that does beautiful work. We always plan ahead to shoot on a clear sunny day, starting very early in the morning to showcase the lighting effects they install. The weather this year was perfect, though I’m always surprised how quickly the blue hour passes into normal daylight.
We left the house at 3:30am and took the first pictures at 4:20. The work Landcrafters had done was pretty extensive on this project and we had our hands full shooting lots of different setups, mostly in the back yard of a beautiful property north of Milwaukee. And we flew the drone too to get some great shots of the lay of the land.
Most of the images were shot using the amazing Pentax 645Z medium format camera. Although I use Canon cameras for much of my commercial work, the Pentax is a great camera to use on a job like this. Shooting outdoors means working with a lot of uncontrollable lighting- deep shadows and blown out highlights are common outdoors. But this camera is one of the top cameras in the world when it comes to dynamic range– the ability to pull out details in both the shadows and the highlights.
After the shoot, I’m able to make a lot of adjustments to each image, using Adobe Lightroom to tweak the brightness levels and bring life to the raw images. It’s a lengthy process, usually taking longer than the actual picture taking, but it’s the key to creating great images to sell my client’s product… in this case, the great work they do for their clients’ homes.
