It’s been a while since I posted here so I figured I’d return with something more than just a single photo. I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about why I’m fascinated with houses at this time of day. I still don’t have a good answer. I guess I don’t need one.
I wrote a piece over on Exposure called Liminal about these kinds of photos and I figured I'd share that text here.
There can be something haunting about a building captured at twilight or sunrise in just the right way where every part of the light is in balance, where the artificial lights inside and outside the structure join up with the sky ...
... I'm not a poet so I'll leave it at that.
Taking this kind of photo is easy if you know what you're doing. For the longest time, though, I didn't, and I had to learn all this myself. It's not magic, and it's not like I'm the first person to shoot this way. I'm not trying to lay claim to a style but I am hoping that by sharing my notes I'm able to put someone else on a faster track than I had.
The breakdown of the method has two parts:
1.) you have to know how to tell your camera to under-expose
2.) you don't always get to choose the scene - nature chooses it for you
Explaining part one is easy. I would mention what kind of camera I use but that doesn't matter, because I've had to learn this on every camera I use. Your camera loves you and wants what it thinks is best for you, and what it thinks is best is a fully exposed photo. It's your job to learn how to override your camera's desires here and say, "No, I promise, I want this way darker than you think I do." If I had to hazard a guess I'd say all of the photos in this essay were underexposed by at one-and-a-half stops, if not two. Your camera may have a dedicated exposure compensation button or wheel, which will make this easier to do on the fly.
With digital photography it's almost always better to under-expose because it's easier to bring detail back out of shadows than it is to recover blown-out highlights. I have found at times that I have way under-exposed one of these shots, often in part thanks to me staring at the display on the back of my camera while standing in the dark and thinking, "that looks fine." It's okay. At times I've bumped parts of these back up by almost a full stop in post and had no significant issues.
Also, I shoot almost exclusively in aperture value mode. Since these shots are done with a pretty wide lens I don't mind using a shallower depth of field so that my exposure time is fast enough to shoot handheld. Under-exposing by a full stop only speeds up the exposure and makes it even easier to shoot with no blur.
So there you have it. Step one: make sure you know how to tell your camera to under-expose. Make sure you know how to do it without thinking.
Step two is a bit trickier. Here's what you have to tell yourself, and you have to mean it: "there are some buildings I will never ever be able to photograph with this kind of result." I do most of my shooting in New Orleans and it is just chock full of fascinating buildings, and there are many of them that I've tried to get pictures of like this and sometimes it just doesn't work. Let me tell you what you do need and from there you'll understand why.
It may seem counter-intuitive but for these shots you need the sun behind you. I know, it smells like using on-camera flash and I would never tell you to do that - but I promise, this is how it works. If you shoot the sunset you know that your reaction is to meter off of the sky so you can see its colors, and everything else in the frame goes dark immediately. However, 180 degrees away you have a darker sky, and the remnants of the sunset are illuminating your subject in a soft and shadowless way. My personal experience is that the closer you can come to facing due east at sunset (or due west at sunrise, obviously) the better chance you'll have at getting the shot you want.
That big beautiful house in your neighborhood that faces west? My friend, you're gonna have to get up nice and early for that one because there's no way it's gonna look right at sunset with the bright light behind it. The other house a few blocks down that faces north? I'm sorry, but that one may not work at all.
And here's the other sad fact: you need some open sky behind you. I live near a street that is just absolutely teeming with fascinating houses ... and is also lined with live oak trees so dense that the squirrels can run for a mile without touching the ground. I simply can't take these kinds of liminal shots there because the trees block so much of the necessary illuminating light. Also, if the color of the building is too dark it can ruin the effect. Light-colored structures work best.
But hey! Here's a beige-ish house that faces east. It has a gorgeous porch light and two interior lights on upstairs and it's practically begging you to tell its story. There's open space behind you when you're facing the house. You know how to tell your camera to under-expose and you're already set at a full stop down. What now?
You might find that in your day-to-day life full of electric lights you've forgotten just how quickly the natural light can change. There's a window of maybe ten minutes (depending on the time of year) in which you can get this perfect shot - so if you're trying to learn this then you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't stand there for the whole ten minutes. Take a photo once the sun has truly dipped below the horizon. Give your self a few seconds to look at it on the display. Take a breather, then take another photo. Repeat until the light is gone. I aim for around one photo a minute.
If you're really there in the moment then at some point you'll get the feeling, and it's a great feeling: "Everything is in balance." The light in the sky is almost exactly the same luminosity as the lights inside the house - as if the front of the building is a one-dimensional facade and the sky is just passing through ... except the incandescents are a warm yellow glow and the sky is a fading and cooling blue-purple, and the front of the house is illuminated by the remainder of the sunset over your shoulder. In this moment everything is in balance.
and then it's gone. The earth and sun rotate on and the feeling passes.
However, somewhere in those ten or so exposures of yours you have exactly the one you wanted. When you see it, look at how many came before and after to help gauge how many minutes along into the fading dusk you really were. Think about how the light in the sky looked when you took the shot. Can you feel that exact moment even now, sitting in front of your computer? I know I usually can. Once you have a practiced feel for that moment you can usually get a few houses lined up and move with speed from one to the next within your short window, effectively catching three or so in the same night.
If everything is in place then when you go to edit you'll find you don't have much to do. Maybe you want to bump up the shadows just a hair to recover some texture in the bushes outside. Of course you'll want to adjust the clarity and sharpness just to punch things up a touch. Overall, though, you'll find that nature and your city's electric grid have come together to do most of the hard work for you.
I hope for two things here. One, I hope it goes without saying that any of these rules I've set out above are meant to be broken. This is just a guideline for understanding where to start but just like with any other aspect of photography the roads spiderweb out from here. And secondly I hope this was helpful to you in some way. If it was, I'd love to hear from you - here on Tumblr, on Twitter as @komara, Instagram as @brotheromara, wherever.
