Interior Photography

This is a shot of the kitchen at one of my recent backyard weddings.

Interior photography can often be tricky. At times, the lighting may not be even or the best angle needs to be discovered to give the room an interesting view.

In this case, I had several light sources going on. There was natural sunlight coming in from the window by the sink and also behind me from the back door and windows, incandescent lighting from the recessed lighting fixtures in the ceiling as well as from the accent lights from the purple hanging fixtures and of course, my flash.

Finding the right balance with all the light sources was critical because choosing only one source as the key light would make the other light sources either too dim or too bright. After evaluating what light I had, I decided that the largest light source was the light behind me… the sunlight coming in from the back door and windows. So I decided to set the camera to get the best exposure based on the natural sunlight. Luckily the light from the back was not enough to blow out the nice accent lighting from the incandescent lights which provided the warm orange glow on the wall near the walk-in pantry.

To get more light to the area near the stove, I decided to add a touch of flash which was diffused by a Gary Fong Lightsphere II light modifier. The flash was set to compliment the sunlight so as not to blow out details in the foreground, but to offer just enough balanced light to lighten up the background of the image.

So do you think taking an interior photo is easy? Take a look at the technical data below and you’ll see how it was done.

Technical Data (for those who want to learn how to shoot like this): The image was taken handheld with a Nikon D100 digital camera set at ISO 200 and a Nikon 12-24mm F 4.0 DX lens set at 12mm. The manual exposure was 1/60 sec at f 4.5 with an exposure compensation set at the camera of +1/3 EV. The flash used was a Vivitar 283 with the auto-thyristor set at f 4.0. The flash was modified with a Gary Fong Lightsphere II light modifier. A custom tone curve was added to the D100 camera to increase mid-tone details and the image was captured in RAW format. No in-camera sharpening was used. The RAW file was converted with Adobe Camera RAW (ACR.) The image was white balanced and exposure compensated in ACR and then sent to Photoshop where it was sharpened with unsharp mask set at 95-1-1 and then saved as a jpg image. This version of the image was downsized with Photoshop for web presentation.