Creating a dramatic night shot

In this post I'm going to go into the work it takes to get a night shot that is dramatic and compelling. It's not work for the faint of heart or someone trying to get an easy picture. But then nothing worth anything comes easy. All photo's in this blog are copyrighted to Sherwood Cox. Contact me for licensing.

My two assistants and I got started on this at about 1:30 AM. We had just finished two interior shots that we started at about 7 PM and started moving our gear outside. They took about 3 hours each.

I had already picked the composition for the shot
on an earlier visit. I knew where I wanted to shoot from and what lens to use. I got a couple of shots for composition and to get the exposure right for the interior and built in architectural lights.

This is what it looked like before we lit the scene.

After 4 hours of setting up more that 50 lights of different sizes and wattage along with more that 500 feet of extension cords and countless spitters we ended up with this. This was shot at the same settings and exposure as the first shot. Still far from a nice photo.

Then as my assistants picked up and packed everything away while I waited to shoot the sky as the sun started to rise. Later once I was back home after this 4 day assignment I spent about 6 hours in post production on this one picture taking out all of the lights and extension cords we couldn't hide along with a multitude of other things like putting in the sky.  This was the final photo.

To me, well worth the effort!

See you next time...