When I was contacted earlier this year by Annie and Jennifer about shooting at the recently opened New World Hoiana Beach Resort I thought that a shooting period in late March would be ideal but sometimes even when you plan around an ideal time of year the weather doesn’t play along, Of the 26 images that we captured over 3 days of shooting 20 images had views that featured the sky. There was a constant haze in the sky during the shoot though and the skies in felt dull and lifeless so I ended up replacing the sky in 19 images.
The trick to a realistic sky replacement is in choosing a replacement sky that is captured at a similar time of day to the sky in the original image and which has similar characteristics. It’s also important to consider the direction of light in the replaced sky matches the direction of light in the original image.
To make replacing skies a little more straight forward I’ve created a sky library that includes almost 1000 skies and I’ve catalogued them into folders of twilight, golden hour and daytime skies. For each time of day I’ve separated them into folders with clear, scattered cloud and cloudy skies. I usually prefer skies with a little cloud in them but how much cloud that I look for depends on the characteristics of the original image so I thought I’d discuss some of favourite images from the shoot and share how I went about shooting the images and then choosing the sky replacement.
Resort Exterior Hero | Dusk
The exterior hero shot of the resort was very high priority as the client planned to use it across all of their marketing materials. During the initial discussions the plan was to shoot it from an aerial viewpoint using a drone. The client also wanted to shoot it with all of the room lights in the resort turned on. The rooms have sensors that turn the room lights off automatically after 20 minutes of inactivity so the plan was to have the housekeeping team move through the resort within a 20 minute period towards the end of dusk and turn the lights on in every unoccupied room. Another limitation was that the resort is situated within the Hoiana complex and the client wanted to avoid angles that featured other hotels within the complex. On the scouting day I put a drone up to check some possible angles but we didn’t find an angle from the air that was suitable.
We decided to shoot from the neighbouring Hoiana Resort and prior to the shoot I scouted angles in the lower and upper levels. We decided to shoot in the upper levels as the resort and landscape looked most impressive from the higher vantage point. Shooting from the neighbouring hotel was advantageous as I was able lock the camera off on a tripod and this ended up being extremely important as there was a huge inconsistency in the brightness of the lights on the exterior of the building. The best time to capture a correct exposure of the brightest lights was 30 minutes earlier than the best time to capture other lights on the resort building and throughout the resort so shooting with a drone would have been too complicated.
Another issue that I had was that as more of the lights in the resort were turned on they became overpowering and distracting. Towards the end of dusk the fishing boats out at sea turned on their bright lights and these images became difficult to use. To limit distractions I decided to use the very earliest exposures of the resort building when the lighting was more controllable and I blended a number of exposures to produce the final composite so that all lights were correctly exposed. On completion I felt that the sky was uninteresting so I ended up replacing it with a twilight sky that I had shot in Ko Samui, Thailand many years earlier. I loved how the darker sky helped the resort building to seperate from the skyline and how the wispy clouds above the island added interest to the area above the islands in the background.
Cove Bar & Grill | Dawn
On completion of the hero shot we headed down to the pool at the Cove Bar & Grill to set up and mark out my camera and tripod position so that we would be ready to shoot early the following morning. To create separation between the upper and lower pools levels I needed to shoot from a high angle so I used my tallest tripod which extends to a height of about 2 meters. From this height I wasn’t getting enough separation so I positioned 2 deck chairs beneath the tripod legs and this was perfect. My assistant and I then used tape to mark the position of each tripod leg so that we could simply extend the tripod and place it in position the following morning.
We had decided to shoot the image at dawn as the client didn’t want any restaurant patrons in the shot and when we scouted I really liked the way that the lighting around the pool and in the trees lit up the image. On arrival at 4am the following morning the food and beverage team had set up the restaurant but they had not had the lights for trees around the pool turned on and below is gallery showing the difference between the two lighting situations.
The fairly lights in the first image are not permanent and we planned not to turn them on but to make the image work I needed some lighting in the trees. We had arrived 45 minutes before first light so we had time to try and solve the issue and Annie called the operations team to request the tree lights to be turned on. In the meantime I used my Lowel GL-1 to paint with light and capture frames with detail in the trees, deck chairs and poolside couches so that I could blend them in to the final composite. By the time I had captured these most of the tree lights were turned on. Not all of them remained turned on so I made sure to make an exposure every time I noticed a light turn on. I then realised that the resorts exterior lighting was off so we asked for these lights to be turned on and then the scene started to look like it does during the evening.
As first light broke it was clear that it was another hazy day and as the sun rose the sky turned a pinkish colour which didn’t feel right so in post production I replaced it with a blue twilight sky that had a hint of red hues in low lying clouds. To make the replacement feel realistic I had to flip the replaced sky vertically and blend it into the reflection in the surface of the pool.
Premier Ocean Suite Living Room | Sunrise
The Premiere Ocean Suite is the most luxurious room at the resort and Annie was keen to shoot the room at sunrise. I usually prefer to shoot interior images when the sun is higher in the sky as when direct sunlight floods into the room from a low angle it can be very difficult to control. I was also hesitant based on the hazy weather that we had experienced on the first day of the shoot but we decided to work with the limitations. We planned to shoot the image after the dawn shot at the Cove Bar & Grill and we set up the camera the previous evening as well. I have 2 x Sony a7R III camera bodies and 2 tripods so I was able to set up the camera on my other tripod, fine tune the composition, set up some lights and leave them locked securely in the suite overnight. We were then able to start shooting as soon as we arrived the following morning.
When we arrived at 5:30am the sky was overcast and didn’t have much life to it. The sun was also obscured by the back corner of the room from the angle that we had chosen. Shortly after 6am the clouds started clearing and the sun appeared so I stepped out to the balcony and captured some images including the sun in case I needed to replace the view in post production.
One of the shots from the balcony that I ended up using to replace the sea, beach and palm trees in post production.
As the sun rose higher it started to reflect from the mirrors in the back corner of the room and shafts of light bounced beautifully on the carpet. The final composite was built by blending images with the lights on, the lights off and flash exposures that I used to add shape to the furniture. On completion of the composite I wasn’t happy with the appearance of the palm trees in the bottom corner of the image so I decided to replace the view with one of the images that I had taken from the balcony. I positioned all of the elements so that they lined up as they had in the original image and I replaced the lifeless sky with a sky from an image that I had taken in Kenya a few years earlier.
Below are more before and after images, some behind the scenes images and some tearsheets from the New World website.
Behind The Scenes
Tearsheets
A behind the scenes look into an interior and exterior architectural project that I shot for New World Hoiana Beach Resort in Hoi An, Vietnam in early 2023. In this post I explain how I approach replacing skies when the weather doesn’t play along during a shoot.