Interior Project

Introduction

Photographing the interiors of buildings has it's limitations, primarily associated with working in a confined space and the quality and intensity of lighting.

For this project Interior photography refers to architectural photography of interiors. This is a great photography niche to have skills in, as many companies, real estate agents and publications are always in need of good interior shots.


My theme was travel.
  The project was challenging, various factors had to be taken into consideration. Lighting, Use of flash/or not, ISO levels, presence of clutter, angle of lens, composition and white balance. Below are my final ten pictures i have selected for my final project.

 NB Pictures 1 to 5 and NB Picture 9, were taken with a Wide angle lens. All the others with a kit lens. The F value, exposure time (in seconds) and the ISO are detailed below the image. 

NB Picture 1 Rome in the Vatican
f 4.8, 1/30 sec, ISO 3200

NB Picture 2 Rome in the Vatican
f 5, 1/40, ISO 3200

NB Picture 3 Rome in the Vatican
f 4.5, 1/10 sec, ISO 3200

NB Picture 4 Rome in the Vatican
f 4.5, 1/20 sec, ISO 3200 

NB Picture 5 Rome in the Vatican
f 5, 1/6, ISO 3200

NB Picture 6 Dubai train station
f 5.6, 1/125, ISO 100

NB Picture 7 Dubai airport coffee shop
f 5.6, 1/125, ISO 360

NB Picture 8 Dubai airport
f5, 1/100, ISO 400

NB Picture 9 Rome hotel waiting room
f4, 1/15, ISO 3200

NB Picture 10 Dubai hotel waiting room
f 5.3, 1/60, ISO 2500

The most commercially profitable images of interiors are those devoid of people. However many of the pictures of interiors that are the most successful as photographs are those that show people relating to what the architects have built.

Sometime having a person in the image adds to benefit the image to give meaning and scale. People don't always improve an image but they always change it.  Often people don't use the architecture in the way that the architects intended. For example below two images with and without people:

without people

with people gives the image a sense of scale 

In the NB Picture 7 the image has scale, dept and interest because people are using the space as the architect intended.

lighting makes the shot. All the interior pictures that made the final cut  for my project were well lit, with the exception of Picture 7. The picture was taken in a coffee shop at Dubai international airport, which is an ultra sleek modern building. It had unique light patterns and quivery architectural details. The large curves in the roof of the building are overpowering and allow slits of light into a generally dark image. I like some of  the light and shadows within the image, the people eating and chatting under the magnificent roof gives the image a sense of scale. There indifference to the space and the way it is used gives an other dimension to the image. I would like to say it is similar to ES Picture 7, but his is brilliant.   

Light

With indoor shots more than anywhere else, lighting is key. 

Interiors are designed around light. Architects design room to have light from two sides of a room in-order to feel comfortable in that room. If there is a window on only one wall, the room will be too contrast y.  In my view NB Pictures 9 and 10 work well because there are a few windows allowing in light. I also like the picture composition because it a warm and inviting space. 

Light is the most challenging area of interior photography.  Most camera equipment is designed for handheld use outdoors. As soon as I took the images indoors I discovered that, the image was much darker indoors. 


Relying on natural light can result in strong contrasts, with beams of light entering through well defined window areas and casting distant parts of the room into shadow. In the future to supplement the available light, and to bounce light into dark corners an additional flash unit can be used. 

In this case I had two options, to use a tripod or somehow illuminate the area. Using a flash for an interior architecture image will not capture the architectural quirkiness and detail. A flash does not distribute the light equally.

Bad interior lighting equals bad image. The worst lighting of all is fluorescent light, it renders a greenish cast that can be distracting.

Windows in a photograph can cause exposure problems, the window will be too bright and the room too dark. Therefore you have to turn on all the lights even during the day because bulbs cast a warmish light. I think this principle works well in the images NB Picture 9 and 10.

If I was to repeat any of the interior project I would like to use a tripod to capture the image, just to improve the light within the image, which can only be improved with increased shutter speed and ISO.

    

In the future I would first turn on every light in the room. This helps add depth and color variance to the scene. I would make sure there are no reflections from lights on pictures, mirrors and windows and then look to see if you need additional external lights.

In most of my pictures I wanted the light to flow naturally, to help lead the eye into the image and get the viewer drawn into the image. This is evident in images NB Pictures 3 and 8. In my view this has resulted in natural-looking, realistic lighting across the whole frame.  

In the future:  The key to good lighting is trial and error, as every room is different and every light source is different. I would Start by setting up your shot on a tripod with no lights, then add one light at a time and check my results.

Working in a large Interior

Rome NB Pictures 1 to 5

To take pictures of Rome interiors I used a wide angle lens, here I have aimed to include as much of the room as possible in the shot.

Working inside large interior like the Vatican in Rome, meant I had to be selective about what I included in the picture and what I had to leave out. I could not accommodate everything in the frame even by using a wide angle lens, in this situation I looked for angles that show the most revealing or impressive aspects of the particular location.

A tripod was essential (unfortunately not used, but will be considered for the future) and various shutter speeds were investigated to decide which one gave the best exposure. Various ISO settings were also investigated. After several attempts the final results are NB Pictures 1 to 6.

NB Picture 6 shows that details can be lost due to lack of light, such as roof can be lost with shadows.

This can be improved with increased shutter speed, hand held flash or low f value.

Styling

Styling is an important part of the shoot

Styling of the room is an important step in the process. Just like models need time to apply makeup for studio shoots, you need to allow time to clean the room to prep for the shoot.
De-cluttering is important to help remove distractions for the eye. In particular, watch for piles of stuff, coffee tables full of magazines, too many “kitsch” items sitting on a bookcase, etc. These things clutter a picture and can be distracting in the final shot.
In my case the distractions were people and i did try and eliminate them from most of my interior images. 
Treat every shoot like a shoot for a magazine and stage the room. I have tried to apply these principles to NB Picture 9.

Shoot Into the Corner

This is one of the most important tips to interior photography and it’s very simple: shoot into the corner of a room to make the space appear larger.

Just like how mirrors work, shooting into a corner makes a room appear larger and more livable. Take this tip a step further by shooting from a low position and a with a wide lens, but not too wide to avoid distortion.

When I shoot straight at a wall, it can make the room seem flat, and sometimes walls can end up bending oddly on camera. Most major interior magazine shoot towards the corner of the room and agree it is the best place to shoot towards. I have tried to use this technique in NB Picture 9.

In Rome let the Interior Tell the Story, NB Pictures 1 to 5

I tried to look for unique ways to capture a location’s personality and showcase its true character.

I looked for unique details to highlight. NB Picture 1 was a really interesting subject the staircase, i tried to capture the quirkiness at an angle. 

NB 6 and 8 are images of  ultra-sleek modern buildings,here i  looked for unique light patterns or quirky architectural details. Every interior and building has a story, so a good way to succeed is to find it and capture it. 

I tried to Get Creative in most of my pictures, trying to shoot from different angles. All the images have worked except for NB Picture 5 because the statue seems to be standing in the large bowl!
In the future i will stay creative and will not be afraid to try something new. I would like to experiment and end up with some thing exciting.  

I tried to get creative with some of my shots, but they did not make the final 10. however, I really wanted to include the following image in my blog because I like the image.

statue in the Vatican
f 4.8, 1/60, ISO 400

 Even though it has shadows, the shot is interesting and has a feeling of intimacy.


In NB Picture 9 I tried to avoid having a bright window in the frame, as this can cause problems with exposure and white-balance. I took a wide shot to show large parts of the room, I found it useful to turn on as many lights as possible. If  I had a flash that had an adjustable directional head, I would have tried to bounce the flash off the ceiling which would have created a diffused and more even light.

Composition

In images NB Pictures 3 and 8 composition was key. I tried shooting from different angles to achieve a more striking image. I tried to avoid distractions in NB Picture 3, like crowds and find a angle that helps lead the viewers eye.

I took many images of this corridor within the Vatican but i chose only to include image NB Picture 2 because of the composition. I like the way the eye is lead to the through the image and the guard siting almost in the same pose as the statue next to him.

   

In NB Picture 8 I wanted the light in the image to flow naturally and help lead the eye. I feel this image is stronger without the presence of people. This one of my favorite images of this project.    

Finally 

Learning how to get good interior shots of a room is a great encapsulation of the technical skills required to be a professional photographer. You must understand exposure, lighting, white-balance, composition, contrast, colour, texture and above all discipline

Styles:

As with food and fashion photography, styles are changing all the time - the current trend being towards natural looking interiors. I will try to Keep up to date with styles by looking at interior design magazines and architecture journals. Even the Sunday newspapers and magazines can give  a fair idea of what is currently fashionable.

The Following photographers have been my inspiration for this interior project. 

Candida Höfer

Candida Höfer (born 1944) is a Cologne, Germany-based photographer and a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students – Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth – Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach.


Born 1944 in Eberswalde, Province of Brandenburg, Candida Höfer is a daughter of the German journalist Werner Höfer. In 1968, she began working for newspapers as a portrait photographer and, from 1970, as an assistant to Werner Bokelberg. She later attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1973 to 1982, where she studied film under Ole John and, from 1976, photography under Bernd Becher. Along with Thomas Ruff, she was one of the first of Becher’s students to use color, showing her work as slide projections.


Höfer began taking color photographs of interiors of public buildings, such as offices, banks, and waiting rooms, in 1979 while studying in Düsseldorf.  Her breakthrough to fame came with a series of photographs showing guest workers in Germany, after which she concentrated on the subjects "Interiors", "Rooms" and "Zoological Gardens". Höfer specialises in large-format photographs of empty interiors and social spaces that capture the "psychology of social architecture". Her photographs are taken from a classic straight-on frontal angle or seek a diagonal in the composition. She tends to shoot each actionless room from an elevated vantage point near one wall so that the far wall is centered within the resulting image. From her earliest creations, she has been interested in representing public spaces such as museums, libraries, national archives, or opera houses devoid of all human presence. Höfer’s imagery has consistently focused on these depopulated interiors since the 1980s. Höfer groups her photographs into series that have institutional themes as well as geographical ones, but the formal similarity among her images is their dominant organizing principle.

In 2005, Höfer embarked upon a project at the Musée du Louvre, documenting its various galleries, examining not only the sacred art they exhibit but also their individual design, arches, tiles and embellishments, with spectators and tourists entirely absent.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida

Teatro Scientico Bibiena Mantora - Mozart Played here at the age of 13.

"I like this shot because it has an intriguing ambiguity of scale: the theater appears large yet somehow small; and it is perfectly formed of grand individual structures. This is not a shot about emotion. It's about colour, lines, light distribution – and inner balance."

"I wanted to capture how people behave in public buildings, so I started taking photographs of theaters  palaces, opera houses, libraries and the like. After some time, it became apparent to me that what people do in these spaces – and what these spaces do to them – is clearer when no one is present, just as an absent guest is often the subject of a conversation. So I decided to photograph each space without people."
Both quotes by Candida Hofer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/feb/06/candida-hofer-best-photograph.Interior Project.

I adore the work of Candida Hofer. She a great eye for interior imagery.  Empty interiors and social spaces that capture the "psychology of social architecture". I like the use of colour in her images. She seems to approach her work as an artist only to capture the motionless spaces designed by the architect.  The final image is like a historical document! 
some of my work has been influenced by Candida Hofer, for example NB Picture 4 and NB picture 1.

JULIUS SHULMAN | THE DEFINING EYE OF ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY

When people speak of architectural photography, these two images always come up as arguably the most iconic and moving of all. His images make you appreciate both photography & architecture, they are most likely seared on your mind’s eye.
Julius Shulman was a photographer for 70+ yrs, capturing some of the world’s most amazing structures and spaces ever created by man. He set the standard that others now strive to reach, and when they can’t– they may simply stage or frame a shot using his famous works like a proven template as homage and acknowledgement that it just doesn’t get any better. Shulman brought Mid-Century Modern to the world as much as the legendary architects he worked with. Sought out not just for for his incredible eye– he had an innate ability to understand and interpret the architect’s intent, and tell that story strikingly with laser-like focus. Correction: Shulman didn’t set the standard– he is the standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Shulman

Julius Shulman

JS Picture 1

JS Picture 2

JS Picture 3

JS Picture 4

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=julius+shulman+photography&hl=en&tbo=u&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=7H8XUefxNIHM0AWmuoGYDQ&ved=0CC8QsAQ&biw=786&bih=524

Julius Shulman's personal archives. Paying tribute to residential and commercial buildings that had slipped from public view, Shulman`s stunning photographs uncovered a rarely seen side of California Modernism.

Julius Shulman's photography was instrumental in crafting the image of the mid century Southern California lifestyle across the United States and around the world. His work keenly identifies the distinctive structural, functional, and design elements of a building, in the context of both its natural surroundings and the people who occupy the spaces. This sensitivity, combined with his intuitive and brilliant sense of composition and timing, has earned him the reputation as a master of the genre. How fortunate we are that Shulman has once again opened his archives so that we may rediscover his photographs of the world's hidden Modernist treasures.

I personally love his work. JS picture 4 captures the amazing architectural aspects of the staircase, but its the composition that makes it a masterpiece. Shulman, by photographing the image with people give the picture depth and a prospective as to the size of the structure.
Pictures 8,9,and 11 in my work have been inspired by him.   

Ezra Stoller

Ezra Stroller

Ezra Stoller was born in Chicago in 1915, grew up in New York and graduated from New York University in 1938 with a BFA in industrial design. As a student, he began photographing buildings, models and sculpture. In 1940-1941, Stoller worked with the photographer Paul Strand in the Office of Emergency Management; he was drafted in 1942 and worked as a photographer at the Army Signal Corps Photo Center. He died in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2004.

During his long career as an architectural photographer, Stoller worked closely with many of the period’s leading architects, including: Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, Gordon Bunshaft, Eero Saarinen, Richard Meier and Mies van der Rohe, among others. Many modern buildings are known and remembered by the images Stoller created. He was uniquely able to visualize the formal and spatial aspirations of modernist architecture. The first time the American Institute of Architects awarded a medal for architectural photography, in 1960, it was given to Ezra Stoller.

Ezra Stoller's photographs are published in countless books and magazines. The monograph Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1990 and reissued in 1997. Beginning in 1999, Princeton Architectural Press issued the Building Blocks series, 10 books on Stoller's work. Contact Esto to arrange licensing for reproduction.

Ezra Stoller received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1998. He died in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2004.

Stoller’s work is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the High Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

http://www.esto.com/ezrastoller.aspx

Ezra Stoller (16 May 1915 – 29 October 2004). His interest in photography began while he was an architecture student at New York University, when he began making lantern slides and photographs of architectural models, drawings and sculpture. After his graduation in 1939, he concentrated on photography.
His work featured landmarks of modern architecture, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Alvar Aalto's Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Stoller is often cited in aiding the spread of the Modern Movement.
In 1961, he was the first recipient of a Gold Medal for Photography from the American Institute of Architects. Stoller's photographs are featured in the books Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller and Ezra Stoller, Photographer. In his later years, Stoller founded Esto Photographics, a commercial photography firm currently directed by his daughter Erica Stoller.
Stoller's son Evan Stoller is an architect and designer of a line of architecturally influenced modern furniture called Stoller Works.

ES Picture 1

ES Picture 2

ES Picture 3

ES Picture 4

ES picture 5

ES picture 6

ES picture 7

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Stoller

Ezra Stoller is a recent discovery for me. Wow what a great photographer. Again i love his work. I love his work for the images he has created to give depth to comtempory buildings. He is not afraid to show people using the space in the building he photographs. Usually a challenge for interior photographers. He uses the light from the windows in his images to enhance the image. for example in ES Pictures 3 and 5 he uses the light from the glass windows to cast shadows, this enhances the image to give it greater texture and depth.

I tried to achieve this with my work NB 7 by composing the picture to include the triangular windows of the airport lounge, as an architectural enhancement to bring interest into the image. The people using the contemporary building made the use of the space more interesting and more meaningful in its purpose of use.    

I love ES Picture 5 the light and composition in this image is fantastic. It gives me a real feeling of how the building is really powerful, large space with a small figure entering into it. The buildings outside give another dimension to the image because they are visible. What i find the most fascinating are the shadows cast on to the floor by the light coming in from the giant windows. I would love to recreate this image but the closest i think i got is NB Picture 7. This image is my personal favorite of my work. The light and exposure is good and the building outside give the image an interest that is lacking in the image below:

Dubai train station
f 5.6, 1/125, ISO 400