This was project I shot for both the designer and and a really great company that I have been lucky enough to work with a few times now. I have to say it is so cool to work with such amazing people, with a design like this it is hard to make a bad photograph. Not to mention in this case the designer is very visual and has great ideas about how to best show off the space. Interior design is fun to shoot because it is collaborative, everyone there becomes a team focused on the same goal, to get great shots.
A truism of shooting architectural photography and interior design or decor is that wide angle lenses introduce distortion. The closer to the center of the frame the less distortion and as you get farther to the sides the distortion can get quite bad. One trick is to keep objects out of the far corners where you are likely to see lens distortion. Another trick is to stay away from wide angle lenses when at all possible. It is always better to back up as far as possible and use a longer lens. I used that technique on all of these images. In this kitchen for example, the camera was pushed up to the window on the window ledge. The only way to get farther back would be to shoot through a window, which I do rather often. of getting as far back as possible to use a longer lens and get a distortion-free shot. The farther back I get the longer lens I can use, or if I have plenty of pixels, I can crop off the distortion. A long lens is part of the solution but 99% of my architectural photography shots are done with special architectural lenses called perspective correction or tilt/shift lenses, combining these two techniques keeps all of the vertical lines parallel and insures great big files that can be blown up and used for huge prints. I have been lucky enough to see several of my standard images made into huge billboards and they still look nice and crisp blown up huge.
A wide angle lens on this shot would have made the space artificially long and made the foreground elements huge so again I pulled the camera waaaay back and then added an extender to my tilt/shift lens. The 1.4 extender made by Canon has the effect of making the lens less wide without sacrificing much quality. It is a common technique to architectural photographers. It always pays off in better images because it feels more like the way we experience being in the room.
I really love this space, the way the architectural geometric forms play against the organic forms of the chairs. The balance of the warm wood herringbone with the warm tones in the furnishings. The soft rounded shapes playing against the angular and the playful quality of the textures and colors of the textiles. I think If I save my pennies, I should be able to move in soon. I could get used to the view of the Philadelphia skyline. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Perhaps you have an architectural or interior design you need photographed? Drop me a line, I would be glad to provide a free quote. To see more images, including of this project click here.