Large Interior Photographs

Large Interior Photographs

by William Lulow

Here’s a neat image which was actually shot with a number of studio strobes. It is a rather large hotel lobby which had to be lit from several directions to render it with a bit of “snap.” This was an all day shoot which encompassed several of the hotel’s rooms as well as an upstairs lobby and one downstairs as well. In addition to the interiors, I also had to make a good image of the hotel’s exterior as well. I worked with one assistant and a hand truck full of lighting equipment.

This image actually took five lights to illuminate successfully. There was one placed camera right, another nearer the camera to fill-in the shadows of the closer furniture, one to the left of the camera to balance out the lights on the right, one closer to the desk to illuminate that part of the room and a strip light (light with no reflector) placed behind the desk to give some brightness to the desk part of the room. Altogether, five lights, each doing a separate job.

If you look carefully, on the right side of the image you will notice that the interior exposure was balanced with the ambient daylight.

This kind of lighting job is great when there is no one around. It’s almost like shooting a still life. But what can you do when you are asked to photograph a large interior space where there are lots of people milling about constantly?

The answer lies in an old exposure “trick” from the days of very slow films. When photography was in its infancy, emulsions added to glass plates were notoriously not very sensitive to light. Consequently, photographers’ images were often “time exposures,” where the lens was left open until they thought that the emulsion had enough light to produce an image. What they noticed was that people in the scenes largely disappeared due to the long exposure times.

Well, I have adopted the same theory for some of my interior shots and it has worked fairly well. I merely told everyone to keep moving and not to stand still for very long. Here is one of my efforts:

You can see that there are no people in the shot except for a guy on the lower right corner of the frame who was sitting at a desk folding napkins. The shot was made as people were milling about, setting up for a party which was being held on all three levels of the atrium. It was a situation in which I couldn’t have told the people to vacate the premises for the shot. It had to be done while all of them were preparing for an event. My only instructions were for them to keep moving as much as possible.

Exposure for the image consisted of about four different flash units placed on the three different levels and fired by remote radio controls. They were fired at regular intervals during a 30-second exposure. I believe the exposure settings for the ISO 100 Kodak Ektachrome film was f/16 on a time exposure. A black card was placed in front of the lens while it was put on TIME and taken off after the exposure. It was made with a 4×5 view camera with the back tilted to obtain perpendicular register of columns and the front tilts used to obtain infinite focus.

These same results can be obtained digitally these days by setting your DSLR to “B”, activating reduced noise for long exposures and using a remote shutter release device. It goes without saying that the camera needs to be on a tripod. If you want to get the same effects under conditions where there is more light, you will need to invest in some Neutral Density Filters for your camera. (I explain these and how to use them in a previous blog article. You can find it in the Archives).