Interior Architectural Photography - How to: #3 - 16 original photos

These photographs are mostly in the order we shot them. We were on site for just short of 24 hours, from about 8 am until about 6 the next day. Its not a dumpster.

It looks like a dumpster, but its actually the chimney from the first floor. The problem here is that to capture the master bathroom and the bed, in context, one also needs the neighbor's house (never include the neighbor's place) and the stove pipe, which in this case, looks like a dumpster.

The first image has no supplemental lights, the second has lights in the bathroom, and is cropped in to avoid the neighbor's bland white siding.

With the bathroom lit and the 16 mm lens. Lighting was surely a single bulb. For a room that small, it would have been plugged in the 400W jack, and dialled way down to almost the minimum. We run a Norman light pack, and now I see they're worth a few hundred bucks. Its been great and I'd recommend one to every photographer who wants to sell their images. The bulbs are still $600 tho.

Actually, this was shot the next day but I put it here for context. I know it was the next morning because of the red chair.

Randy is an architect and Caroline is an interior designer. They designed and built this place out of job site scraps they collected over years. Surely much or most of it is new, but they had a garage and a plan for years. We shot this around ten am, while we were waiting for the art director to show up. And since there is no red chair, I know he wasn't there yet.

These appliances were once photography by Julius Shulman himself. Randy and Caroline were hired to remodel the penthouse of 3100 6th street in San Diego. The two guys wanted all the old stuff gone and new modern furnishings instead. So the appliances went in the RC garage. And probably some light fixtures and who know what all.

You can see the reflections of the interior lights in the windows. Means we were still too early.

Windows are starting to clear.

This shot had been planned literally for 10 years. If you're not sure what I mean, search Julius Schulman Case Study 22. Then you'll go, "oh yeah. I have seen that. I see what you did there."

This next shot literally took all day to set up. You have no idea the number of ruminations and deliberations that went into the location of the table and everything. Notice that the handles of the cups don't line up with the backs of the chairs, or that the chair corners don't run into a parallel line on any wall. You can distinguish every item because of its separation from all other things on site. We shot it late at night because the plan was to turn it black and white.

That image is so much better in high definition.

This is the next am, probably around 5:30 am in July. In the winter we work banker's hours, in the summer we do third shift. They say there is a 7 minute window for when the lights work right.

And in the summer it may even be less than 7 minutes because you can already see the reflections in the glass.

Thought I'd add an exterior for context.

This was the last house we shot before anyone realized how bad it was going to get for architects, designers, and photographers. We went over 2 years before we got our next contract for an interior residence. Randy and Caroline didn't work at all for a long time. I remember about 2015 we called them to see if they had any projects going, and they had just started in on a multi-family residence. Not sure what happened, we split from the US southwest and headed north, and later east.