You hear about these two out of Portland? Apparently they won't shoot without studying the sun first.
Studying the sun?
Yes, that big ball in the sky. Where it's going to be and when, which room it'll hit, what hour it peaks into the east-facing kitchen, or south-facing living room. There's an app involved. Sunseeker, I think. They walk around the location pointing the phone's camera in all directions, taking screenshots of the clearly marked path of the sun with times of day stamped for easy reference. All before a single Pelican case gets unpacked.
Why?
Because that's how the shot list gets developed. The run-of-show. The order of operations. By letting the sun dictate which rooms get shot when. Because some rooms look best early in the morning, others late in the afternoon. Think about your own house. Isn't this the case?
And he lights the interiors himself too. Brings his own strobes. Pocket Wizards and gels and umbrellas and barn-doors and the whole deal.
I don't get it. You just got done telling me about their obsession with the sun and natural light. What's with the flashes?
It's counterintuitive, I know. But this isn't that blown-out trigger-happy wedding photographer with a speedlight situation. The strobes are there to help the natural light, not fight it. They're methodically placed, and subtle. And supplemental, and symbiotic. And sometimes the sun gets bashful and stays behind clouds, so the strobes are there to step in. It's their time to shine, so to speak. And it'll be believable, because of the data gathered from their trusty Sunseeker experiment. And even when the sun is cooperating, a blue sky outside can bleed right through the glass and rewrite the color of the walls. Benjamin Moore's Swiss Coffee becomes something cooler, something other, something nobody specified and nobody asked for. The strobes can help the colors stay true.
Can't that be fixed later, in Photoshop?
The answer to that question is almost always "yes". But here's the thing. He is later. He does all the retouching himself, which is why he'd rather not brute-force color correct in Photoshop, when it could've been solved in camera. Even though he could, and he can. Instead, every exposure is gathered on the day for a specific reason. Not bracketed as insurance, curated with intent. Assets, assets...always talk of assets. So, in Photoshop, every path is hand drawn, every asset is accounted for. We're talking frequency separation when needed. Manual compositing. Surgical, layer by layer. The kind of retouching that takes longer and looks like it never happened. No overseas handoff. No automated pipelines or games of telephone. No software making decisions on his behalf.
So, no HDR software I take it?
HDR software can be "tonally criminal"... strong words, but that's what I heard one of them say. Apparently what that method can do to color, for example, a little green from the trees outside becomes a lot of green, the image drifts further from the room as it actually existed. And what that method can do to the edges of objects and window frames: weird halos, uneven black levels, an unsophisticated look that can only be described as "crunchy". All imperfections gets compounded and multiplied. Why shoot yourself in the foot like that? This is the wrong way to handle post production.
How long are we talking then, to do it the right way?
The crux of the matter is that time spent in post production is orders of magnitude longer than the time spent shooting. An eight-hour photoshoot can easily demand 40 hours of post production, or more to do it right. Not fixing mistakes, but mining the potential of the raw materials. Squeezing all the juice. Is 40 hours a lot? Depends who you ask.
Okay, I think I'm getting it. What kind of camera do they use?
Well, they don't own a digital camera.
For real?
They own plenty of lighting and grip. A Pentax 6x7 film camera, too. Which they actually use. But digital? They choose the right tool for the job. Canon, when speed and playback matter. And Canon, when a 17mm tilt-shift is necessary. Fujifilm GFX when the highest fidelity of detail is what the project demands. No loyalty to a system. Just loyalty to the result.
What about her?
She's the compass. Nothing gets delivered without her say-so. Nothing goes up on their instagram, nothing leaves the post-production stage, nothing gets signed off on without passing through her first. She sees things. The kind of things that don't show up until after you've been staring at something too long. You want to know if an image is ready? Ask her.
And apparently — this is the part that stuck with me — he photographs interiors the way a painter approaches a still life. "Never had the patience to paint one", the way the story goes. But to photograph one: Now that's doable. Still contemplative. Still unhurried. But a more reasonable turnaround than oil-on-canvas.
The final image looks like the room. The room as it actually was, on its best day, in its best light.
Where are they based again?
Portland. But word is they're still at large.