Shooting Home Interiors

SCOTT KELBY

If you want better looking home interior shots, here are a few things to do that will make a big difference: First, turn on all the lights in the room (turn on every single light you can). This isn’t to add light to the scene—this is to give the room some life (realtors have homeowners do the same thing when they’re showing the house to prospective home buyers). Now, you have two jobs: (1) To make the room look big. Nobody wants to see a tiny little room, and one trick for doing that is to shoot down low, from a kneeling position, with a wide-angle lens. Then position your camera so you’re aiming into one of the room’s corners. One of the biggest ideas to get your head around is what to do with bright window light coming into the room, because your camera isn’t going to properly expose for what’s inside the room and what’s outside the window at the same time. So, here’s what you need to consider: First, it’s now fairly acceptable to let what’s outside the window completely blow out to white (you even see this now in fine home magazines, so don’t let it freak you out). If you feel that what’s outside is as important as what’s inside, then you need to take two shots with two separate exposures—one exposed for the room interior, then a second where you expose for what’s visible through the window, and just ignore how dark the interior looks in this second shot. Then you put these two separate exposures together in Photoshop (yup, I did a video for you on that, too, at www.kelbytraining.com/books/digphotogv3). Now, (2) the final challenge (hey, I didn’t say this was easy) is to evenly light the room. Most pros use one or more small off-camera flashes, hidden behind furniture (so you don’t see them) and aimed straight up at the ceiling, to evenly light the room.