Interior Challenges

I've managed to get out twice in the last week with my camera, which is quite rare for me at the moment. As I wrote about on Thursday, I shot some pictures at the Bear Hotel in Hungerford last Wednesday, and yesterday I waltzed on down to Basing House in Basingstoke, to take some pictures of the Sealed Knot Civil War reenactment there. It's been a few years since the last pictures I took of a civil war battle, and this year through up some new challenges and opportunities. I'll speak more about that on Thursday though!

For today, I have another picture from the interior shoot at The Bear last week. I am far from finishing these pictures, but am pleased with the way they are starting to turn out. Doing these interior shoots is all still a learning experience for me at the moment. One of the key challenges I come across is what to do when you have a very bright scene outside coming through a window. One option of course is to frame it so you don't include the window, but this may ruin the chance of a great angle or perspective. People may think it is no problem if you use HDR and therefore bracketed shots, but I don't think it is as easy as that. For instance, if the room is bright enough that you only have to go to a  +2 exposure to cover the dark shadow areas, your finished HDR image will look odd if you have to also go to -4 or less to cover the highlight areas, which could easily be the case with a blown out window.

Long time interior design photographers could get round this problem with lighting the main area to balance it out with the window, or leaving the window area as blurry and burn out, which is actually quite common. Masking in the original RAW file is very difficult when you have a heavily framed window such as this one, and may not 'fit' with the tone of the rest of the picture. Therefore, I went for a little blown out, mixed with some detail. The important thing for me is to include into the picture, so that it doesn't take your eye away from the main focus, which is the main room area. Whether I have succeeded with that at the moment I can't tell, but it is certainly a challenge for me to ponder and work more on in future.

The Bear Hotel Hungerford 2014

Whilst the sunshine in the UK was surprisingly pleasant yesterday, I was up at the historic Bear Hotel in Hungerford, capturing their recently furbished interiors. Perhaps not the best day to pick to do an interior shoot, but it was fine with me. The excellent light outside gave me excellent light to work with inside.

I have many photos to go through and process but here is an early result from my shoot yesterday. I was inspired to capture the main restaurant from this angle, as I saw a sepia photograph hanging on the wall in the restaurant, which had obviously been taken decades ago. The room looked slightly different then, there used to be a bar where the blackboard area of the photo above is, but the picture itself was all the inspiration I needed to produce a 2014 'update'.

This is an HDR image taken from 3 exposures, post-processed in Lightroom, Photomatix and Photoshop.

We've Been Expecting You

I've spoken recently about interior design HDR photography and stating that if I was to make a career out of photography, this is the field I would most likely go in. Well I have been making strides towards this, and have been building up my portfolio for the website that will contain my interior design work, which is HalewoodPhoto.com.

I contacted the Halfway bar and restaurant in...(I would like to say either Newbury or Hungerford, but as it is halfway between them, hence it's name, I cannot say exactly where it is. I believe it is also the halfway point between London and Bristol) to see if I could come down and take some free pictures of their establishment, of course for their benefit but also to build up my portfolio. Suffice to say they were very kind people, and let me pop over for an before opening one Sunday so I could could take as many shots as possible. They were very welcoming to me on the day as well. I haven't given them the complete finished results yet, but today I have included 4 pictures from this 'shoot' within this blog post.

When I launch my interior design business, I want to focus on the interior side of the business, because these are not so much affected by the weather outside. I am absolutely sure that shooting exteriors will come into the package, as you can see in the final photo below, but I don't want this to be the main selling point of the business.

I'm marketing myself as an HDR interior design photographer, but whether or not I heavily emphasise the HDR aspect, I am not sure is important. All the photographs today are HDR's from at least 4 exposures, but heavily layer-masked, so that they bring the reality back to the picture, without losing the dynamic range and detail of a tone-mapped HDR picture. Whilst non-photographers love HDR pictures, I don't think many hotels or restaurants want over-cooked (ba-dum tish!) HDR images, that lose the reality of their establishments. Whilst you know I think there is a place for hyper-real HDR's, I don't think the websites of businesses is one of them.

I hope you like the pictures today, any feedback is welcome! I will speak more about my ambitions in the interior design world over the next weeks, but right now am off to check out one of the latest updates to Photoshop CC - the perspective warp. Sounds intriguing!

Who Sees these Interiors?

First of all, the title comes from the opening line of the Manic Street Preachers song 'Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning). That is the only tenuous link, nothing that clever. Interior work is something that doesn't often feature in my photography, and yet is a key area I want to focus on in future. I have always loved how interior shots lend themselves so well to HDR, and the lack of a sky means that the time of the day is not so important.

If there is any photography business I could see myself going into, it would be interior design. This is simply because there are plenty of hotels, bars, local businesses and houses that require good photographic work. The main reason though, would be to bring my own creativity to these buildings, and we all know that HDR in the UK is yet to have created a big impact in the business world, as HDR real estate photography has in the US. The French photographer Serge Ramelli is a particular inspiration here, and has some tutorials on shooting interior design (www.photoserge.com).

The photo above was taken at The Swan Hotel in Bibury about 2 and a half years ago, when my main camera was the Nikon D90. It is an HDR image, taken from 3 exposures, and was taken on a tripod, which is essential for interior design photography. It means that you can shoot at low ISO, and therefore create all the light you need for a particular scene, without having to deal with noise.

You can see the image as it came out of Photomatix below, before my layer-masking and retouching steps in Photoshop and Lightroom. I used Topaz Adjust as well, to bring out more detail, perhaps lost by the layer masking process. If you click on either photo, you can alternate quickly between the 2 in the lightbox, to see the before and after changes a lot better.