Lighting Interiors

Photographers who have little or no experience with interiors photography often ask about formulas for placement of supplementary lighting. For some genres of photography, such as portraiture, there are formulas that one can rely upon when using supplementary lighting. However, there are really no lighting formulas for interior photography, as far as placement of the lights and lighting ratios. It depends upon so many things: the kind and amount of equipment you have, the look you are after for the photo, the configuration of the room, the colors of all the major surfaces, the time of day, and so on. What one needs to understand mostly is how light works and what one's resources are as far as lights and light shaping equipment and materials. Most just dive in and gain that understanding intuitively with a lot of practice, but a book such as Light, Science and Magic might be of some help as a reference. It is really a matter of constant problem solving if one wants to do it well. 

Lens Variations

The performance of lenses of the same make and model can vary from one copy to another, sometimes considerably, due to manufacturing variations or use. Roger Cicala

at Lensrentals has written a nice, albeit, rather technical, article on the subject: Measuring Lens Variance

Pixels, Resolution and Reproduction Quality

Here is a useful article that addresses these matters: Pixel Perplexities and Other Digital Nonsense

It is amazing how many professional photographers, graphic designers, Web designers and editors do not understand these concepts, which are so essential to proper photo reproduction and proper Web display.

Evaluating Photographic Lenses: The Technical Challenges

Here are a couple of interesting (very) technical articles by Roger Cicala, the owner of LensRentals.com:

There is no Perfect Lens

There is no Perfect Lens Test Either

The gist of these articles is that evaluating lenses can be difficult, because different copies of the same lens can exhibit markedly difficult performance and no one lens testing methodology can tell the whole story about lens performance.

Where You Stand

"A good photograph is knowing where to stand."--Ansel Adams

Of course there is a bit more to it than that, but all the rest doesn't really matter much if you don't know where to stand.

How to Calibrate Your Computer Monitor

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, calibrating your computer monitor is essential for obtaining the best results when processing, viewing and printing photos. Here is an excellent article on the Scientific American blog that provides  an overview of the process of monitor calibration, including some suggestions for the hardware and software to use for this: "Gamma and White Point Explained: How to Calibrate your Computer Monitor".

I would like to add that, ideally, the white point to which you set your monitor should be consistent with the the color temperature of the ambient light where your monitor is located and where you evaluate your prints. I use a white point of D50 when calibrating my monitor, and I use a special fluorescent bulb that has a color temperature of 5,500 Kelvin (very close to the D50 color temperature), mounted in a softbox for nice, even illumination of my monitor/print viewing area.

For the more technically oriented, here is a more in-depth explanation of the process on the Cambridge in Color blog: "Monitor Calibration for Photography"