With a massive multi-million dollar home, how can you do too much???

I met the owners of this beautiful Villa a few months ago on another assignment and they loved our work so much, they called us back to photograph their home. They where very clear that the other photographer that photographed their home, did not do a good job at all. The images where 'tired' is what I was told.

I am not a person to bad talk any other photographer. Many times what happens is when a person does the same thing over and over again, they see the same thing and get lazy. I am always reminded of something Henri Carterr Bresson once said about taking a different way home every day. That way you see things different. I believe that philosophy can be expanded in so many different ways. In this way, it is the ability to experiment with new techniques and ideas. It is a further emphasis that if you seriously want to be able to be a photographer as a career, you cannot stop learning and being passionate about what you do. In this day and age, YOU WILL get replaced.

For this 'shot' I took about five different angles. Each angle was also shot in a bracket mode of 5 different shots (at 1/7 exposure increments). I then processed each five shot angles through the program called Photomatix (www.hdrsoft.com). I recently installed a plugin that allows me to create these in Aperture without having to go and find the files and do it manually.

Once I had each HDR image, I opened them up in the new photomerge version of Photoshop CS4. I used to think of the photomerge capability in the older versions of photoshop to be nothing more than an overrated gimmick, but this new version simply ROCKS!!! I was completely amazed as to how seamlessly it blends. It takes a while (especially when merging 5 large HDR images), but is very worth it. All I can say is seeing this image on the blog does absolutely no justice.