This the fourth in a series about how we take our photos. The pictures were taken with a Canon 5D, with a Tilt/Shift Lens. If you are new to architectural photography, you might take a look at the earlier posts, and here's the quick list of the prior posts: Part 1: Camera/Tripod; Part 2: The Tilt/Shift Lens; and Part 3: Taking the photos/Editing. I have also posted specific pieces about Photographing Bathrooms and another on Photographing Family Rooms.
Kitchen shots can often be a very important photo because of the role that modern tastes have played in making the kitchen a design point. Special granites and other surfaces, high-end appliances and fixtures, and expensive flooring mean that the real estate agent must take extra care when displaying the kitchen. Fortunately, there is often a lot of great "material" in the kitchen, and if you take your time, you can take a great picture.
To illustrate the point, I almost never feature an interior shot as the cover photo of the front of the brochure. I almost always put the front of the home on the brochure cover because it is sort of expected. But I did the photos of an interior unit townhome, and the exterior picture was just another row home in the middle of the row. But the kitchen photo turned out to be the really inviting shot.
The original photo had the entire arch, but I elected to crop it. Why? I think the crop that I used gave it a feeling almost as though you were walking through the arch rather than standing outside of it. It almost makes you want to go inside to walk through the arch yourself.
I also want to convey a very important note about positioning the camera to take the best photos. Sometimes, you can spend 15 minutes extra just to get the shot. In the above photo, I am standing in the middle of the dining room and where the middle of the dining room table was located. To get this photo, I had to ask the owner if it was OK to move his antique table and if he would help me do it. He seemed a little skeptical about why I couldn't just take the picture in the kitchen. He deferred to my expertise (and the tripods, lights, and other stuff probably helped in that regard), and helped me move the table and was very pleased with the end results.
Here's another kitchen photo which I also liked a lot, and this photo also illustrates the point made in the previous paragraph.
The picture effectively shows off key components to the kitchen: 1) the sliders with the view to the outside; 2) the great kitchen nook; and 3) the total depth and size of the kitchen. This was a family-sized home, and the goal was to paint a visual image of the kids working at the kitchen table while the dinner was being prepared without showing that scene explicitly. To achieve that result, I had to stand outside the house! In this case, I opened the window, took the screen out, and photographed the room with the camera at the window's edge peering in. Yes, this took an extra 5-10 minutes to set up, but the end photo was good and so was the result (i.e., we sold the home earlier this year).
Finally, as you take more and more photos, you learn from the ones that you thought were NOT as good as you would have hoped. Here's one that missed my hopes/desires.
This was a really hard photo to shoot. The room is so deep (and extends behind me into a large family room) that it was difficult to get light all the way to the end of the kitchen to illuminate it properly. I had to use some giant flashes (A/C powered) on umbrella stands; it looked like a nuclear flash every time I clicked the photo. Parf of the challenge was that the very pretty, but very dark, wood floors sucked up a lot of light. I would deem the photo to be technically OK, but uninspiring, and NOT achieving the feel of the previous photo. If I had to take the pictures again, I would move forward about 10 feet past the breakfast table and focus instead on the giant island and everything behind it. However, that said, let me point out some things that I did correctly and would probably not have done a few years ago: 1) red fruit on the close table and yellow flowers on the island - reds and yellows tend to pop in photos; 2) I remembered to turn on the under-the-cabinet lighting; 3) I remembered to turn on and pretty up the walk-in pantry with glass door; 4) I also liked the nice hot spot on the floor that really conveys the gleam of the wood - I had to tone this down a bit in Photoshop, but I did not eliminate it; and 5) I used a remote strobe to illuminate the butler's pantry at the far left corner of the photo because otherwise the area would have been very dark and ominous.
Anyway, I hope this post has been of interest. Let me know if you think I should do a series covering various rooms like bedrooms, baths, dining rooms, etc.
Margaret Hokkanen, Carlsbad Real Estate
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