Shooting Interiors

Shooting Interiors

by William Lulow

Note: A student’s questions prompted the writing of this article.

As I have said many times, modern digital sensors (CCDs) are extremely sensitive. Much more so than film was. It’s easier than ever to make acceptable interior shots by increasing your camera’s ISO and shooting with smaller apertures. Your camera will even adjust its white balance automatically, whereas in the old days, we often had to filter ambient room lights. The one caveat is that by using available light, you really won’t achieve any special lighting effects. Not only that, but even though the camera will compensate for differences in color temperatures of existing lights, it’s never quite the same as lighting an interior with strobes. Most interiors shot with available light are “good enough” for use on the web, but would never be acceptable for high end magazines like Architectural Digest. (Although I have seen some images there that I would not include if I were the photo editor).  If you shoot a lot with available light, you might consider trying to balance the lighting inside with the lighting outside.

The way to do this is to begin by taking a light reading of the exterior, either with the camera or a hand-held meter. Walk outside and use an incident meter to measure the overall exterior exposure. Let’s say it reads f/11 @ 1/125^th of a second and ISO 100. The trick then is to match the interior exposure with the exterior one. Most of the time it is impossible to do this without adding some light to the interior. You need to bring up the overall level of light inside to try to match the exposure you got outside. Sometimes I bounce a flash off the ceiling of a room. Other times I need to actually light the room with a couple of flash units with umbrellas to keep the light inside fairly soft. What you are trying to avoid is to have the windows completely overexposed in the shot as well as the interior too dark. So, the balance can be a bit forgiving on both sides. In the above shot, the exterior is fairly clear and the interior has enough light to see all the relevant detail.

Here is another image where the exterior is not clear, but the window is not very overexposed either. This picture was shot with the addition of two strobe lights added to bring up the amount of light in the interior to try to match the light from outside.

In the course of a regular assignment where you need to get as many shots as you can in an eight-hour day, it’s not always easy to take the trouble to do this with each and every shot that contains a window. But, an effort should be made to avoid blown out windows.

Another technique to use is to retouch the photographs to bring the interior light levels up to the exterior ones. A handy tool to do this is Photoshop’s “polygonal lasso” tool. You can use this tool to mask the windows while you bring up the interior light level by selecting the “inverse” setting with the windows masked. Then, you can go back to the normal mask of the windows and make them darker to bring out more detail. That is how the above image was obtained.

Here are two more interior images. The first image here was shot with available light. The second was lit with strobes. Any “available light” image needs to have the camera mounted on a tripod because shutter speeds need to be slow. See if you can spot the differences. Since the shot of the restaurant interior didn’t contain any real “window light,” it was simply a longer exposure. The bottom image was completely lit with artificial light.

So, shooting interiors comes down to how much time you have to make quality images. Good interior shots rely on all techniques, exposure and some retouching to make them really shine.