hi there

has any one got any tips or tricks for photographing your site work.
im talking more kitchens , floors, built ins

im looking to take some good shots for websites, flyers et. I have a Nikon 5200 camera  but cant get the pic the way I want it.
they usually have too much light in areas and shadows etc in others


thanks alan

I am sure that there are many FOGgers who have huge credentials in the photography area but...

You need a wider angle lens for whole room shots and try and get a good depth of field so that everything looks sharp and is in focus.

Lighting is important and I now have a pro flash from Nikon which can be mounted on the camera or placed anywhere in the same room to create the right lighting effect.

I have stood outside and photographed through an open window to get more of the room in the shot.

I use Photoshop to sort out my mistakes and to change the shooting parameters after the event.

Remember the 1/3rd rule for key shots.

Peter

Remember the 1/3rd rule for key shots.

And that is....?

Quote from: Peter Parfitt on September 28, 2014, 12:14 PM

Remember the 1/3rd rule for key shots.

And that is....?

When you compose a shot it works better if there is some interesting feature at about 1/3 in from the left or right edge and 1/3 in from the top or bottom.

Peter

the best thing is to hire a pro and work the price into your business.  they go in, do the job right the first time, put it on your website right away and go on to the next thing.  a pro shot speaks volumes that reflects well on your work.

Good advice, I agree.
I like the challenge of shooting my own and it helps improve my work when I can see and study the errors through a lens or on the computer screen.
Tim

If you're not a pro the less lights you use the better off you are going to be. Think of how much trouble you'd get into with a ton of tools that you have no idea what to do with. Keep it simple.

As was mentioned use a tripod. Wide angles are imperative but you don't need to worry about distortion unless you tilt them up or down. Use the tripod to set your height and keep the camera level and the lens won't distort anything. It's not a bad thing if it does for things like a detail but for the overall shot of the room it's distracting.

The problem with very dark and very light areas is solved not by lights but for waiting for the time of day when those lights are in balance with each other. Typically that's dusk or dawn. If you still have trouble with certain lights that can't be dimmed turn them off and try another longer exposure without them. You have the advantage of a digital camera that has a screen to show you what your last shot looks like - use it. Make changes. If you have a strobe/flash just point it into the ceiling or into a big wall behind you. Anything really that will diffuse the light.

You've gotten good advice here so just experiment.

If you want I wrote a photo primer once for a thread I did on a trip: http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=491784&page=7 and while it's primarily written to the audience of that board the advice is general and what I would give in my presentations to younger photographers at school or such.

Good luck.

Gregor

You should look at the Nikon CLS lighting system. The camera can support Nikon's CLS lighting system. In the manual flash mode and using the Nikon CLS flash units in the manual mode you can fine tune remote triggered SpeedLights to fill the darker areas. You will need to close doors or drapes to block any bright outside light.

The Nikon ClS flash system used optical sensors so the lights will need to be in line of sight or you may an extension cord with a sensor.

If you want to even out the lighting without having to carry much, there are drawstring bags made from the same light-diffusing fabric used to make the light hoods.  You just clip the bag around the bulb and it really does seem to help eliminate hot spots.  It would work on either the homeowners lights or your work lights.

Depending how serious you are about getting professional looking pictures of rooms you might want to look at Tilt-Shift lenses or software approaches to correct geometry of a normal lens like DxO Viewpoint.

These will not fix the lighting issues you mentioned, but correct the room geometry to look natural.

Quote from: Peter Parfitt on September 28, 2014, 12:14 PM

Remember the 1/3rd rule for key shots.

And that is....?

This might help.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=rule+of+1/3rds&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=wmn&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1920&bih=1078&source=lnms&sa=X&ei=rm8sVNC6IbSV7AbPlYHYCQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAA&dpr=1

Eric, in the spirit of constructive criticism, this photo of yours would be a prime candidate for the PC (perspective control) or as someone else called it (tilt shift) lens.  it would help align the columns vertically instead of showing them "falling over".  you might be able to get the same thing with setting the camera level with the midway point between floor and ceiling.
the lighting though, looks great and nicely balanced, which i imagined took some work to do.
compositionally, it might make it more interesting if all the chairs were not lined up--perhaps the one second to last on the right was at an angle as if someone had just left sitting there.  that's of course up to personal taste, and the client's desires of course.  but i would have suggested it to give them an option for a little bit more dynamic look.
I would have also preferred a higher angle to see the bar top but then of course you're dealing with shooting straight on into a mirror so that presents its own problems.  one possible solution would be for the client to place a prop or something non-reflective at the base of the mirror--something interesting that looks like it would belong there.

Yes, I also captured this using a 17mm TSE however, it was simply, for the lack of better terms flat and almost sterile and looked amateur (which to me is counterintuitive as it takes 5 minutes just to align a tilt shift lens). 

This whole room however, was captured using the 17mm TSE as the difference in depths created an almost random distribution of column angles (I hope that conveys and is understandable) as the columns furthest away had a different angle than the columns closer to me.

The lighting was three Elinchrom strobes.  If you look really closely, and pay attention to the shadows, their location will reveal themselves    The bar was flanked using two Rotalux gridded soft boxes and the fill was dead center behind me using a hooded octal box. 

I do agree with you on the chairs, and you're right it is a matter of personal taste.  I do enjoy capturing an engaging image and a chair, just as you've described it would create visual tension in a positive way!

As for the mirror, It was not shot straight on for two reasons,

one, well, it's a mirror and my ugly mug would be smack dab right in the middle of it, i know that it could have been taken out in post but shooting this angle with a wide angle lens created the "engagement" that I lacked in the rest of the composition.

two, there's a TV behind the mirror, it's one of those fancy Seura displays with a LCD behind a mirror.  There is another shot that shows the TV live!

I know it's hard to take one shot out of context as the more you have the better the story.  I do however believe in creating a strong composition in which a single photo can stand on its own out of context and series.

I appreciate the reply and input!  Now let's help you guys with your pictures so you can make money on the areas in which you are truly masters!

Cheers,
Eric

You're welcome. I completely understand your point about the 'corrected' shift image looking flat. Great for documenting an object or space but can hamper the sizzle at times.

p.s. titl shift lens is not a necessity, I would rather invest in a good flash and a tripod head with micro adjustment

Regarding tripod heads, Manfrotto 410 or 405 are hard to beat for architectural photography.

As for lighting, oh my is that a deep yet utterly necessary tangent for architectural photography. Flash is an intimidating thing for photo noobs. We're not talking that little pop-up thingy on an entry level SLR. Flashes need to be off camera, often using multiple heads, often with diffusion devices attached and using stands. Also have to address the issues of color temperature and intensity of the ambient light (if any), be it a window (and the time of day and cloud cover) or the artificial lighting (be it incandescent, fluorescent or LED) and worse yet is a combination of them all. There you will be adjusting the ambient light using your shutter speed relative to your flash output to get the desired intensity balance.   And balancing the color temps takes using color shifting gels on the light sources or doing each light source as a separate image and recombine in photoshop. The good news in all this complexity is how MUCH easier it is to get a handle on it using digital vs film.

As far as cameras go, if you want great images you'll need to go beyond your cell phone or entry level cameras. Those can be useful in a pinch but don't come close to offering the features and accessories you may find helpful down the road. Look for 'full frame' SLRs. What that means is the digital sensor is the same size as 35mm film image area. And for lenses you want those that are designed for that sensor size. Here's an explanation from Nikon regarding their DX vs FX product lines: http://www.nikonusa.com/en/Learn-And-Explore/Article/g588ouey/the-dx-and-fx-formats.html  I haven't kept up with all the brands and models but Canon and Nikon were long dueling for supremacy in this area. One thing Canon has an edge on is their 17mm tilt shift lens, IIRC Nikons widest tilt shift is 24mm. But both are extremely capable brands and once you're invested in lenses you tend to stay with the same brand (I happen to have Nikon). There's also larger format products like Haselblad and view cameras but no need to go there IMO for the DIY architectural or product photographer.

You'll want to understand the relationship between f-stop and depth of field. F-stop is the varying size of the lens aperture, with the larger number corresponding to the smaller aperture size. Depth of field is what impacts the focus of near and far objects in an image. The smaller the aperture the greater depth of field. But also the smaller aperture restricts your light which matters if you want a human in the shot who can't sit perfectly still for a 30 sec exposure using the dim indoor ambient light. It's tempting to just increase the 'film' speed but that tends to degrade the image quality. Flash might be the rescue in such situations.

I have some books that are now out of print, but here are a few newer ones that might seriously help a newcomer to the disciplines of architectural photography. I haven't read these but per the descriptions and reviews seem to address many of the fundamental issues:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1933952881/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1412676474&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1608953009/ref=pd_aw_sims_1?pi=SL500_SY115&simLd=1

One thing to keep in mind when starting out is that the human eye and brain are amazing at processing images and technology is trying to catch up. For example when you look at a room in person your head and eye is changing position and every time you do your eye adjusts its focus and iris (f-stop) and your brain combines all these varying details into one 'image'. It also is adjusting the color temperature in the various inputs and combines the blue window light with the yellow incandescent light and you perceive it all as the same when it isn't.  So your job when taking a picture is to overcome all the limitations of the technology to capture the image as your far superior eyes and brain see it. Do this long enough and your eye and brain will be able to dumb down to the level of the camera which especially helps you see how to adjust the lighting.

Lastly I haven't even touched on composition. That's the largely personal preference aspect but all the fundamentals of camera settings and lighting apply to all of it. Enjoy the journey

Looking at the two columns, I was actually taking that to be lens distortion.

The perspective is interesting and makes a great picture, but I think I would have tried to straighten those out a bit - it looks "wrong" to me with them tilted in that much... shouldn't take too much of a tweak though to deal with that...