A recent shoot of a mixed-use office and residential project for Mark Fairhurst Architects (www.mark-fairhurst.co.uk). The building is located next to the busy train tracks into London Bridge station. We found a good vantage point on an adjacent block, to put the building in context as dusk fell. And we took a few interior shots in a magnificent apartment - the perfect flat for a railway enthusiast.
interiors
Using flash in interior photography
I recently spent a day photographing a beautifully refurbished Victorian house in south London for Hughes Developments (full gallery on their site here).
The owners had created a country home feel in a house that is just 5 miles from the centre of London. Maybe because they're just a few miles from some of London's biggest and best outdoor spaces - Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common - they'd asked Hughes to create a boot room for them. It was a tight space to photograph, and though I'd shot the rest of the house using almost exclusively natural light, with a bit of feature lighting thrown in here and there, this required a bit of extra light to make it work.
Shooting through the doorway into the boot room was just about the only way to go, as it was a very narrow space. Little natural light was getting into the boot room, and not from a flattering direction. The room lights would probably have worked, with a bit of tweaking in post, but flash allowed me to create more interesting light that modelled the joinery, wellies and coats more attractively.
Shooting through the door also offered the advantage of allowing me to hide the Speedlite in the side of the room the camera couldn't see. I used Pocket Wizards to trigger the flash. The lens is a Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8.
Here's the various lighting scenarios and the final, processed image:
Turning out the lights
It was a real pleasure to shoot this South London loft apartment for Poulsom Middlehurst a few weeks ago. Or more precisely, one half of a one-room loft apartment, as the client was in the process of moving back in and we had to push his bags and boxes to one side of the space and focus on the other!
The big roof lights let in a huge amount of natural light. Luckily it was an overcast day so we didn't have big contrast ratios and shifting shafts of sunlight to contend with. We opted for a clean, unoccupied look and the white walls and bare wood floor looked great bathed in that soft light.
We didn't need any additional lighting so we could use our time to concentrate on the shapes and structures of their ingenious design. Sometimes it's great to turn the lights out and keep things simple...
