INDOOR PHOTOGRAPHY IS ABOUT FRAMING
The whole concept of indoor photography is to present the room or area you are photographing in an interesting and appealing way. One day many years ago, I happened to meet a professional hotel room photographer who, armed with an eye-wateringly expensive Hasselblad camera, would travel the world taking awesome photos of hotel rooms for the biggest chains that you can imagine, including one of my favourite!
When talking to him about how he takes his photos, we had a long ranging discussion about how awesome and time consuming the process of HDR Photography is. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and if you have no idea what it is and want to know more about it; this is an awesome guide to HDR photography for beginners.
To get an awesome photo, he would use a tripod and get multiple triple exposure shots in a panorama going around the room. He would then stitch together the blended HDR shots manually in a panorama and photoshop the camera out of the photos! And whilst I am neither as advanced or as dedicated in the craft of photographing rooms as him, I have worked with some of the leading 5* hotel brands and restaurants and here are some of the things I have learnt:
4 Tips for Indoor Photography
- Make sure you have a good lens. If you need to capture the whole room then I would always try to use a 14mm to 20mm lens, I am very biased towards prime lenses, but you should also note whether the camera you are using has a micro four thirds sensor (APS-C) or is full frame, as that might affect the extent of the wide angle shot you can get.
- Use a TRIPOD! I really cannot stress enough the importance of a tripod in making sure that you capture some really good images, especially if you are attempting to capture HDR shots.
- Maximise the depth of field by setting an F stop of between 14-22. Naturally the depth of field that is desirable will depend on the framing of the shot. Setting the aperture to be so small will mean less light comes into the sensor, so you will need to reduce the shutter speed and make sure you keep the ISO down to avoid any artefacts or digital noise.
- Use the histogram function on your camera. This is a crucial tool as it gives you a real-time insight into what data your camera's sensor is picking up. Photography with digital cameras (and analog ones too for that matter) requires an understanding of the interplay between your camera's sensor, the depth of field of your lens, the shutter speed, data and light.
See Some of our Indoor Photography
