Brian’s Photo Tip #4: Interiors
acla:works director, Brian Lewis, is a highly skilled photographer. His favourite subject? Architecture, of course! In this ongoing series [read Photo Tip #1, Photo Tip #2 and Photo Tip #3], Brian shares tips on successfully photographing buildings.
Brian's Photo Tip #4: Interiors
Building interiors present a range of photographic challenges: colour temperature, mixing daylight and artificial lighting, dressing the space, people, reciprocity failure, depth of field, availability of time. Really good images will take time to compose, light and dress the space and the owners may not allow the time for magazine type photos that can take the better part of a day or more depending on the size of the space.
More recently I have found that owners are moving in quickly – there is very little time to work around them moving boxes of material into the space. This is when the photographer relies upon discipline: compose, check verticals, corners, depth of field, disturbing objects, moving from room to room quickly assessing the best angles to compliment the space. It’s surprising how much can be done in half an hour under these conditions.
In these cases there is no time for lighting set ups and you rely on adjusting lighting in the computer. These sort of photographs may be acceptable for brochures and press releases but they will not produce those excellent images you see in magazines that require hours of lighting set up for each shot.
Fortunately today many of the problems of interior film photography have been made infinitely easier by the design of incredibly complex algorithms in modern professional digital cameras that allow manipulation in order to deliver an acceptable image.
In this case this image describes how the space is being used by its occupants yet still gives an indication of the general interior space.
Small conference rooms will require super wide lenses and care must be exercised to keep the camera square and level with the picture plane otherwise distortions will emerge.
This photograph was taken when the occupants were moving into the space so care had to be taken to place figures that give some life to the space.
– Brian Lewis
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A Quick Bath
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Trinidadian Modern
Related Project
Private Offices
Small in size, this fit-out sensitively approaches the scale of space.
