Archive
Behind the Scenes: Composing For Interior Photography
If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen some of the behind-the-scenes shots I’ve posted of my camera and tripod positioned so I can get a good shot. In interior photography, the size of the room and layout of the furniture sometimes present challenges against the composition I want to achieve. Below are some of those shots and the end result.
Technique Tutorial: Photographing and Editing a Bathroom
I hate shooting bathrooms. It is one of the most challenging scenarios I face when shooting interiors. Mostly because of the darn mirrors; I have to figure out how to shoot it without catching my reflection.
When I shoot, I try to give the image context by showing a room in relation to its surroundings. The image above, for example, is a master bathroom in a condo. So I always try to show the room it belongs to in the reflection in the mirror. This gives you a sense of space and lets you know that you can access the bathroom from that bedroom. Easier said than done.
The first step is to get an exposure for the room reflected in the mirror. If I shoot to expose for the bathroom, the reflection will be overblown and you won’t see detail in the mirror. You can see from the reflection in the shower door that I am holding a flash “Statue-of-Liberty-like” and bouncing it off the ceiling. I also have a strobe in the room to provide the light in there.
Now I want to expose for the bathroom. There’s one problem, however, and that is white balance. I’ve written about white balance before and how you can use gels to correct for light sources. In this case, the bathroom is lit with incandescent bulbs (warm light) and the light coming from the open door is daylight (cool light). To filter out any blue light, I just close the door. That doesn’t solve my problem, though. The light that comes from flashes is also daylight balanced. So I put a full cut of CTO (color temperature orange) on the flash and set my camera’s white balance to “tungsten” (incandescent for Nikon users). The difference is subtle, but I want to capture what I saw with my eyes and what I saw was the warm glow of the bulbs. But I still have my reflection on the shower door. One more exposure to correct for that:
Then it’s just a matter of masking in Photoshop. I use the first exposure for the room in the mirror and to correct for the overblown lights. I use the third exposure to get rid of my reflection. I then had to do some cloning to remove the reflection of the camera on the shower door. The end result is the image at the top of this post. Three shots for one bathroom. Did I mention how much I hate shooting bathrooms?
Photographing an In-Home Arcade
Most of the luxury homes I photograph have at least one room dedicated to entertainment. Maybe it’s a pool table in the garage, or an in-home movie theater. Then there’s the in-home bowling alley. But a recent shoot took the cake for the number of arcade games in one room.
It’s one thing to add six arcade machines in what used to be a garage; but the homeowner went the extra step of knocking out a bedroom and bathroom to add another machine…
..and did I mention the 80-inch LCD TV?
Who needs bedrooms and bathrooms in a house when you’ve got an arcade? Actually, that red sofa does have a pull out bed.
Here are a couple more looks at the room:
All this just leaves one question: Can I borrow some tokens?
Photographing a Private Bowling Alley
This was probably my most unique assignment to date. I got a request not too long ago asking me how much I would charge to photograph one room. I thought, “Just one room? That’s odd.” I asked for more information and found out this was a bowling alley inside someone’s house! The lanes were installed by Fusion Bowling and they install private bowling alleys. Talk about a niche market!
I showed up for the job in a very exclusive community and found out the home belongs to a professional major league baseball player. The bowling alley is actually on the second floor.
The shoot was pretty straight forward. The lanes create natural leading lines that make composition a no-brainer. The client asked if I shot HDR. I told him I don’t because I generally don’t like the look of HDR; it just doesn’t look realistic. I have seen some interior photographers use HDR in a style I like, but I haven’t figured out the technique. Every HDR I’ve tried always has that “HDR look”. I prefer a natural look so I take multiple exposures and blend them using masks. I did take several exposures in this case specifically for HDR and I might post an update so you can see the comparison. I’m currently reading RC Concepcion’s “The HDR Book” to see if I can learn something new.
You can see more images from the shoot in the gallery; and don’t forget you can like, comment on, rate and share individual images on my site. Give it a try!
Technique Tuesday: Bedroom
Ok, I’m calling this “Technique Tuesday” but I can’t promise I’ll do this every week. But today is Tuesday and this is about a technique I use almost everyday; hence the title. Brilliant, no?
f/10, 1/3 second, ISO 200
The image above is pretty much the RAW image straight out of camera. It’s shot with a Canon 5D and a 580EXII on camera with a diffuser and bounced off the ceiling. If I remember correctly, I believe I have the flash set to TTL and boosted it by +2.
I then set up an Alien Bees 1600 strobe to camera left fired through an umbrella and set to 1/8 power for the image below.
f/8, 1/8 second, ISO 200
You can see right away what adding an extra off-camera light adds to the image. (Note: the image above was tweaked slightly in Adobe Camera Raw.) I then took another exposure for the window:
f/10, 1/180th, ISO200
I also tweaked the image above to bring out the blue in the sky a little. I then placed that image on top of the first one in Photoshop and masked out the window for the final image. I also got rid of that bothersome sensor dust in the ceiling.
That’s it. No fancy HDR tricks. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions.
Flickr for Photographers
So, not too long ago I wrote a post about how a guy in Canada found a picture I took of him two years prior because when I uploaded it to my Flickr Pro Page, I filled in a title and description. He searched for the keywords and found it.
click for larger image
Well, the other night I uploaded some of my interior photography to the site and among the keywords I added was the city of “Kissimmee”; since that’s where the houses and condos are. The next morning I got an email that “Kissimmee - The Heart of Florida (Kissimmee Convention and Visitors Bureau)” had added me as a contact on Flickr.
click for larger image
The admin for the “Visit Kissimmee, Florida” group asked to add the above image and two others to their group page. Now, I think this is all pretty cool, but the implications go farther. It shows how a potential client (and that’s how I see them) can find your work if you take the time to add titles, descriptions and keywords to your photos. This doesn’t just apply to Flickr. The meta data in your photos can be found by spiders and robots on the internet and anyone searching google, Bing or Yahoo can find your work. I check the stats and analytics from Flickr and my Web site and I get some referrals from people typing in certain words in a search engine.
David Hobby over at the Strobist blog wrote a fascinating 4-part series on Flickr; how photographers have been discovered, how to write tags and descriptions and how photographers can use the power of Flickr. It’s worth a read:
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/04/flickr-and-you-part-1-rebekkas_19.html
