My goal for this project was to produce winter scenes of this house in southern Ontario. The stone and block on this beautiful home are manufactured by Arriscraft, the Stone Products Division of General Shale. I was hired by ad agency Creative Energy to to produce photographs that would be used in General Shale’s calendar and in marketing material for Arriscraft and General Shale. Aerial drone photography allowed me to produce overall views of house, property and surrounding area. The ability to produce photographs that are just few feet above tripod height as well as detail photos of the upper levels of a building make drones invaluable for architectural photography.
The twilight photography was shot with a Nikon D800 on a Manfrotto tripod. The aerial drone photography was done with a DJI Inspire 1RAW drone.
Exterior photography in the winter can have it’s challenges but this day was quite nice with temps just below freezing and almost no wind. The only challenge was the icy crust on top of 10 inches of snow made walking with a camera and tripod a slow process.
The aerial drone photographs were done with a DJI Inspire 1RAW drone. Aerial drone photography is perfect for a project like this. To shoot overall views of the house in the surrounding area I may take the UAV up to an altitude of 100 to 150 feet (30-50 meters), but for most of the drone photographs I like to shoot from very low altitudes. I find that the range between 15 and 50 feet is the altitude I use for the majority of my drone photographs of buildings.
Because the house was so well lit with soffit pot lights, the twilight photographs were pretty straight forward. I combined separate captures of the sky, soffit lights, porch lights and interior lights. These were all balanced in post production to produce the final images. All of the proofs from this project an be seen here: https://claytonstudio.com/escarpmentdr/
One of the benefits of shooting in the winter is the short day. Shooting from sunrise to twilight in mid summer can mean a 15 hour day while in late December that can be as short as 9 hours.
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