I headed out the door for an exterior and twilight shoot. The date had been set days before and the weather was not cooperating the day of. There was a lot of cloud cover in the sky, which would be great for the exterior shots, but not the best material to work with for the twilight itself. Oh well, it is Texas, so the weather is going to change before I am done anyway.
I arrived and set out to get the exteriors I needed and then set up and wait for golden hour to hit. As I wrapped up the exterior shots, the clouds began to break up. The weather just might work in my favor! I had the client turn on all the interior lights in the house and I set up ready for the perfect moment. The clouds looked great, except I am still early and official sunset is still a half hour off. With fingers crossed, the inevitable happened - clouds began rolling in. With horror I watched as the great, picturesque broken cloud cover I had was replaced with an almost complete overcast sky. As the sun set and the light from inside the house began to match with the exterior light, I just shot the best I could given the circumstances. I wanted a really nice, natural sunset! This house had the sun naturally setting behind it, one could not ask for more. My best shot so far was with a glimmer of sunset behind the house and to the left of the frame. Nothing else was golden.
So, to fix this issue, I used a speed light flash with an orange gel and went to work fixing the problem. The sun now pretty well set, I shot multiple exposures of the front of the house using the gel flash to give a soft golden glow to the shadowed areas of the residence. This shot will have to be saved in post.
I took all of the photos into Lightroom and Photoshop. I composited and masked in all of the exterior flash work until the house was nice and warmly lit. Next, I had to deal with the overcast sky that was now the bane of my existence. I swapped that sky for a rich and warm sunset sky. The result was simply gorgeous and a real attention grabber of a shot for the residence.
