Interior Photography for Ads

Photographing Interiors
Last week I shot several interior vignettes for an Ad for Designer Consignment, a unique and stylish consignment store that specializes in home interiors and decor. The advertisement will be in the upcoming issue of Kansas City Home & Garden and will feature interiors and decor when relocating to a new city…like Kansas City.

I worked with Interior Decorator Ginger Jackson, who works as a freelance decorator and consultant at Designer Consignment. Together, we worked out the location and timing of the shoot and put the final touches on the scene before shooting.

Photographing Concepts
What was interesting about this particular shoot was the concept of relocating to a new city. How do you convey that in an image which is supposed to highlight interiors, and decorating ideas? An interesting challenge for sure, but we decided that simple is usually best and went for some straightforward approaches that anyone could pull off from the unique pieces that they could find at Designer Consignment.

Challenges of Location Photography
One of the obstacles of shooting on location is space. Space is almost always at a premium so their is a challenge in finding creative ways to brighten tight spaces that need a little kiss of light. That was the case in this shot below of a dining room arrangement. The only window in this room was a tiny 4×4 just off to camera right. Not quite enough to fill the room adequately in all places, but a good start. The one place that wasnt getting much light at all was the cove under the bar. All the detail was getting lost in shadow. I decided to try using a small speedlight flash off camera right at first but this proved to be way too much even at the lowest setting. I finally settled on a handheld Lastolite Tri-Grip reflector, silver side out to bounce some of the ambient daylight back into the cove. It was still a bit much for my taste, but it was acceptable for this shot. Below are the before and afters of this scene.

Moving On
While we both like the scene, we felt like the overall image wasnt quite what we were after. We decided to move on and added in the dining room table and added a few place settings for some foreground interest.

Here we added a dining room table with place settings for added interest in the foreground with the bar and decor in the background. Images ©Chad Jackson | Jackson Visuals

Still not Satisfied
This was getting us closer and was much better, but we still felt that it didnt quite capture the concept of relocation. It looks nice and inviting, but when people relocate, what comes to mind first? Furniture.

Living Room is Where it’s At
Ginger had done a wonderful job arranging the weathered leather couch right next to a large 3 bank North facing window. This offered us beautiful light and though we had more space to work with, it was still a bit tight, especially in the background. In the interior photo below, you can see that the detail in the background is being lost in shadow. You can sort of see the ornate white clock on the wall, but the sculpture and wood screen are almost completely gone. If you didnt know what they were, you would have a hard time seeing it!

Before - Here is the before shot with the detail in the background getting lost in the shadows.

Creative Lighting Solutions with a Canon Speedlight
To solve this problem, I first tried bouncing the ambient light in to the scene…no dice. I really didnt want to break out my Elinchrom strobes for this, the space was really tight. I decided to try my nifty little Canon 580ex speedlight. I attached a white sto-fen diffuser cap, setup a reflector stand with an attached 1 stop diffuser panel. I fired the Speedlight through the diffuser panel with my Elinchrom Skyport radio triggers at a setting of 1/8 power. Voila!  A decent background fill in a 2 foot space.

After - Here I used a Canon 580ex speedlight with sto-fen diffuser cap shot through a lastolite 1 stop diffuser panel on a stand to achieve the nice even background fill on the decor.

Wrapping Up
At this point, we were running pretty tight on time and this was the final shot that we decided on. I think it came out pretty good, although I would have liked to tweak the background fill a bit more to see about diminishing the relatively hard shadows that were introduced by the Speedlight at close range.

All in all it was a great shoot and we came away with some great images. Hopefully, this helps some of you out there who are trying to light on location and in tight spots. Get creative with the Speedlights, there quick, powerful, small, and most importantly… lightweight!

Cheers!
Chad

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Photo Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.