Tuesday, October 17, 2017

More Than Just Pretty Pictures

"Fabulous pictures!! You did a beautiful job capturing the home, the yard and how one lives in the house."--a client.

Of course I appreciate compliments as much as anyone, but I particularly appreciate it when someone can explain why they like the photos. Capturing how one lives in a house (or uses the spaces in the case of public or work spaces) is a big part of how I prefer to do it when circumstances permit.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Anatomy of an Interior Photo

All wood interiors are one of the more challenging subjects for interior photography, especially with a bright exterior window view and direct sunlight entering the space. Interiors are usually challenging when windows are involved in the scene, because of the extreme difference in brightness between the interior and exterior, and this problem is compounded when the interior has very dark surfaces, especially when the dark surfaces are on all sides, such as in the example below. 

One way to deal with the problem in some situations is to install large neutral density filters on the outside of the windows. However, this is sometimes logistical impossible or highly impractical and these are expensive and time consuming to install. In my opinion, using supplementary lighting is by far the most practical way to deal with this technical challenge. Further compounding the challenge in this example was the very wide view, which leaves no room to place lighting outside of the composition. Because of this I had to light from within the composition. Reflections of the lights on the walls meant that I had to do a variety of exposures with the lights in different positions and edit the lights out when doing the digital processing. Combining the various exposures together digitally so that the lighting blends together can be quite a complex process that requires minute attention to detail in order to avoid leaving unwanted artifacts in the final image.

For this example, I used 10 separate exposures to create the final image.

The following photos show the ambient lighting as the camera sees it, some of the lighting exposures that I used to create the final image, and the final result.


Ambient Exposure

Ambient Exposure
Lighting Exposure

Lighting Exposure


Lighting Exposure
Final Image



Sunday, July 30, 2017

Recent Work

For this photo of the auditorium of the San Francisco Opera House, my goal was to show the essence of the design, rather than the breadth of the space.