Photographing Interiors Pt. 1

Photographing interiors is all about capturing the mood and feel of a space. If you simply blast on camera flash onto it chances are both these things will be lost because light will fall away fast leaving forground burnt out and background too dak.

Lighting interiors is a huge skill in itself. Whenever possible I prefer to use the available light because it makes the space much more natural looking.  

We’re going to look at composition and setting a manual exposure because you have to control exposure, not leave the camera to do it. We’ll be making sure there are no converging verticals and ensuring the whole thing is sharp by using a large depth of field, and because we’re not using lights that means a slow shutter speed combined with a tripod

This film was shot at the beautiful Mill at Gordleton to photograph the newly refurbished bar area and were instantly presented with the problem of bright highlight areas caused by the sun streaming through the windows.

This is the first of three films about interior photography in which I’ll show you how I set up the room, the camera to shoot an overall view, and deal with the troublesome highlight by combining exposure in camera with careful Raw File processing - which we’ll show you in part 2.