Over the years I’ve done a lot of interior photography for clients in Edinburgh, Lothian, Fife, Glasgow and other parts of Scotland, especially of show homes.
As a photographer, there is always something nice about photographing an interior that has been perfectly styled by a stylist beforehand but it’s not as easy as it looks.
Often, when photographing interiors, especially for offices and retail and leisure premises such as shops, restaurants and hotels, you also often have to take photographs whilst the premises are in use. This does present a few practical problems, the main one being to try and avoid people in the photographs, unless of course you are planning to do that. One advantage of a showhouse is that you can do all the photography when it is closed to the public, something I’d always recommend for other types of interior photography.
Kitchen interior – additional lighting was carefully hidden to achieve this.
As an interior photographer in Edinburgh, I use a range of specialist lighting and lenses. Lighting is very important. Sometimes you can use natural light if it is streaming through a window in an interesting way but with interiors you also invariably have to capture the effect the artificial lighting in the room. Relying on the interior lighting on it’s own as a source of light can work on occasion but usually it just creates more problems, especially when there are mixed lighting sources.
Without getting too technical, all sources of light have a colour temperature. One way to look at it is if you’ve ever had to choose white paint for your house. There are so many different shades. Daylight is generally bluer than other forms of light. Tungsten lighting (which is now being phased out in favour of LEDS) is very yellow in comparison. You still find fluorescent lighting which is greener in colour compared to other sources of light. Even modern LED’s (although often less yellow than tungsten), can come in a variety of different shades of white from cool to warm.
Interior of show house bedroom.
To the naked eye all this appears quite normal as your brain interprets all this for you. You will still see the lamp in the corner of the room as yellow compared to everything else but you probably won’t appreciate just how much of a colour cast there is from all the different light sources. Unfortunately, a camera doesn’t have a brain to interpret what it’s seeing. If the subject has a yellow cast it will appear more yellow, likewise with blue and green colour casts. It’s actually more accurate, as your own brain interprets what you see than show you how things actually are. I once watched a fascinating BBC Horizon documentary about illusions and the brain but that’s a whole different blog!
We always take a range of details and lifestyle shots which help create a sense of atmosphere.
The challenge for an interior photographer, is to find a balance where the scene looks right but things such as lights are also rendered accurately without affecting the whole scene. This is where additional lighting comes in, as this helps to ‘balance’ the lighting by making one light source more dominant than the rest. This makes it much easier to create an accurate colour balance. To help achieve this, I also use specialist software to analysis and produce accurate colour.
So, taking some nice interior photographs of a showhouse might seem like an easy thing to do but there’s more to it than meets the eye!
If you are looking for interiors photographers in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Fife or other parts of Scotland then why not drop us an email or call us for a chat about your requirements on 0131 639 0001.