Page 11 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 3 #2

in Photoshop and truth be told, we lacked the
experience and the knowledge required to ac-
complish that goal. This was only the first of
many hard-learned lessons.
In 2009, I travelled from Geensboro all the
way to North Carolina's Outer Banks in order
to photograph three schools in a single day. We
had just acquired strobes, so we gave our cli-
ent the option of strobes or natural light. They
opted for natural light—which was no real sur-
prise given the fact that electing strobes would
cost substantially more. Waking at 3:00 AM, I
headed to the Outer Banks and completed my
assignment in the time I’d been allotted. ABOVE: Show Place, High Point, NC.
A few days later, I received a call from the cli-
ent. They were not pleased with the results. This
time it wasn't the image composition that was
the problem. The issue was that the colors in the
photographs bore no resemblance to the colors
the interior designer had selected for the walls
when the building was constructed. I really
didn't have an answer. I had no way of knowing
whether the walls had been painted the origi-
nally specified colors. One downside to working
with ambient light, I tried to explain, is that col-
ors will shift with changes in ambient light. And
to me, color shift is a key element in creating
emotionally powerful images. This didn't help
appease them. Despite learning later on that
sections of several of the schools had, in fact, ABOVE: Villagio Hotel, Fayetteville, NC.
been repainted, we’d learned our lesson and
from that point on, we’ve only worked with
strobes.
Once again, I found myself wondering where
emotion "fit" into this scenario. It seemed, or
so I thought at the time, that I could produce
emotionally powerful images or accurate col-
or. I just couldn't have both. If I were bound to
creating images that were straight and square
and accurately colored, well, that had to mean
there would be no emotion.
JD's research unearthed another unexpect-
ed discovery. Apparently, architectural pho-
tography required special lenses. These lenses
would help us remove some (or nearly all) of
the visual distortion in the camera. Our gen- ABOVE: GTCC, Greensboro, NC.

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