I’m putting the finishing touches to the photographs I took for Elaine and Derek’s wedding in Dublin just before Christmas, and amongst a few photos I took of the Burlington Hotel, where they were hosting their drinks reception before heading off to La Peniche for dinner, was this exterior shot which happens to be taken at just the right time of the day.
The time at which I captured the photo was purely down to how Elaine and Derek’s wedding day ran, rather than being a deliberate plan by me to photograph the exterior of the hotel at the optimal time, and so it was a fortunate coincidence that as I left the drinks reception, my job just about complete, the natural daylight was nicely balanced with the artificial indoor lighting in the lobby of the hotel.
Achieving a balance between natural and artificial light is the holy grail of artificially-lit photography – for instance if you’re outside during the day and using flash, you want to try to balance the ambient daylight and your flash so that neither overpowers the other, but rather they complement each other in a way that doesn’t scream “this photograph has been lit by a flash”.
In this case, the ambient light is the near-dusk daylight that you get at about 4.30pm on a mid-December evening just before the shortest day of the year. The artificial light is coming from the tungsten light sources inside the lobby of the hotel.
This is not so much an architectural shot (though I have categorized it as such here, because ultimately the subject is the building itself), as a “scene-setter” for the wedding album, and so I have no real hesitation with photographing it at the widest end of my 17-50mm lens, accepting that with that will come all sorts of distortion of the shape of the building.
Instead, I’m mainly concerned with framing to keep the ground and the sky both in the frame, and to ensure that the name of the hotel (obscured slightly in this presentation by the title of this blog post) is at the top-left of the frame.
It’s worth mentioning that the light levels were quite low when I took the shot – after all the Burlington are unlikely to want to blind their guests with overpowering light in the lobby, and so it needs to be close to sunset when the exposure of the lobby is within range of the exposure of the exterior – by definition when the two are nicely balanced. Within range meaning probably a stop or so.
The final exposure, even at a wide aperture (which isn’t ideal for an architectural shot either) and a high ISO (not ideal in general) still requires a non-ideal shutter speed of 1/25s, which is just about hand-holdable.
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