Say what you want, but exteriors are a challenge to shoot. Unless you are lighting the exterior up at night with a gazillion lights, you have to deal with this crazy thing called 'natural light'. The hard part is learning its patterns (and I'm far, far from having mastered it). Morning light has a certain quality, as does afternoon light (in a negative way), and so does evening light - in fact, every hour that goes by in the day offers a slightly different type of light that can greatly influence the exterior shot.

This one was a sort of perfect storm of light (in my opinion). I had started with the interiors earlier that day, knowing that I had to get a front-shot of the row and that the sun would be hitting the row as it was going down. The reason I say it was a perfect storm was because of three things - the warmth of the light, the cool-blue fall sky, and the clouds. The first two are understandable, but why the clouds? Clouds add subject matter and perspective.

Where'd the clouds go? 

No, they weren't photoshopped out - this is the second day of the shoot.

The reason I like this one is because it shows off the balcony, the decorative elements of the railing, the common-area of the community, and the row across the common-area. The light isn't nearly as cooperative this time around, but it still works.

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Whew. HUGE. I really like the fact that you can see what's out the window, but the blue and green outside contrasts with the inside wood in a slightly unflattering way. Oh well - it's still a nice photo.

And here's what the place looks like from above. Dining room, kitchen, and living room - all in one spot.

What a sight! Gigantic, huge, beautiful, elaborate, amazing - these words don't even begin to describe it.

Here's a view from a little lower:

That gives it some perspective.

Now for some more:

Can you imagine...?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - lighting these gargantuan homes would take a lifetime. Use the ambient light, bracket 7 frames, and post-process. Either that or spend your day (and lots of money) playing with lights.

The other half of it is knowing how to post-process correctly. Don't overdo it. The goal here isn't to make something look fake/HDR-like, it's to make it look real. If you've done any research into HDR, you know that the human eye can observe a much greater dynamic range than your camera. So you walk into a home like this and your eyes can adjust for the windows, for the shadows, for the mid-tones, for the overall tone of the space in an instant. Our cameras don't have that luxury - they expose for grey (18% I believe). If you are in evaluative/matrix metering, your camera meters the whole frame and exposes accordingly - most of the time, the highlights coming from windows throw the metering out of whack and send the rest of the space into darkness. The camera thinks it did a good job, believe it or not. 

I'll be writing a much more in-depth critique of Exposure-Fusion/Exposure Blending vs HDR in an upcoming post, so stay tuned. Oh, and the critique won't feature math, benchmarks, noise ratios, or any of that other 'junk' - it'll be a comparison of images. Imagine that.