Weather…

Have you ever taken a selfie pointing a flashlight in your face? No, me neither.

Phil and I celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary this past week, and while there are many moments that I cherish, the one that stands out to this day is how relieved I was when I woke up and saw that it was an overcast day. Perfect, I said to myself, the photos will look great...we have a natural softbox.

You see, I’d grown up surrounded by photography. My Dad was a photographer and still to this day, has a dark room in our house, and I still have some of my first, and very old cameras. I grew up understanding lighting and how it impacts the image we want to capture; I grew up knowing that sunlight is the last thing you want when trying to create a balanced photo.

Ever taken a selfie pointing a flashlight in your face? No, me neither. Instead, if I was the selfie inclined person, I’d try the old fridge trick, you know, where you stand in front of your fridge with the door open, and use the soft, universal fridge light as a soft box.

You see that’s what sun and cloud are. Cloud (rain or without, it doesn’t matter) creates the best natural soft box we could ever wish for. Sun creates harsh shadows. Some of the worst work we’ve had to redo has been because it was on a full sun day.

So, can I be vulnerable and admit something…? I watch your funny reels when you express what triggers you with your clients and dream of creating one of my own, with my triggers…

The biggest trigger…that email/text/message along the lines of “We need blue skies/we need sun/the weather has to be perfect”…. Yes, the weather must be perfect, but as the content creator can I decide what perfect means? Please. Pretty please?

I’m sure you know that I do a lot of sky replacements (taking out the ‘actual’ sky and replacing it with a better one), and that I do a lot of window replacements, so it looks like blue skies outside, but did you know I do the most when it is actually blue skies and sun outside?!!! Even the twilight shoots we do – I almost always replace the sky – the reason I need to be on location at twilight/sunset shooting is to get the glow of the interior lights through the windows’ from outside, not the sky. Ok, that’s enough of my secrets…

You know that haze we get with sun? Well, that’s what it looks like through the camera too. We look up with our naked eye and see this wonderful sky, and yet the image captured produces the haze that makes it look cloudy and foggy. No problem: sky replacement it is.

I’m not saying that if you have a great listing, waterfront/oceanfront/beautiful gardens etc. we don’t want sun to showcase the best of it; I’m saying that if it is this type of listing only a small part of the shoot needs sun/sun + cloud/sun + high cloud (notably exterior videography). Beyond pouring rain which ‘lays’ on windows and is hard to hide/edit out of the interior photos, the weather has little to no impact on 90% of the shoots we do, because of my wonderful magic. And with the remainder 10% of shoots, it only impacts the exterior videography…a tiny, yet significant and important portion.

It would be a terrible business decision on our part to ever produce anything substandard. Believe me, we take so much pride in what we do, and understand how important it is to your sellers that their homes are showcased in the best possible way. I just ask that we are trusted to lead what this means. If we can’t pour the concrete because it’s raining heavy, it doesn’t mean we can’t lay the rebar and do all the prep work.

We watch the weather like a hawk. Every morning and every night Phil’s job is to look at the weather across the province and compare it with the shoots we have. We’ve learned to rarely trust it longer than 48 hrs out. Even the worst days can have the potential for that magic moment of light coming through the clouds which creates wonderful exterior videography.

So next time the weathers looking bad, don’t worry – we’ve got you. We don’t need to reschedule the shoot - we just need to coordinate a better day/time to get the exterior videography work done.

Thank you, as always, for all of your support.

Sara (and occasionally Phil when he’s not annoying me).