Morning Wood
Being prepared for anything is the name of the game in everyday real-estate photography. Despite being kitted out with everything I could ever need for day-to-day work, there are times when I walk into a property and sigh heavily as I’m missing a niche bit of equipment that I should have put in the back of the car. Often, clients don’t realise the technical difficulties associated with certain types of interior styles and fail to mention the peculiarities of a particular property, so it’s my job to ensure that there are no stumbling blocks when it comes to delivering top class results first time.
Shiny, orange, wooden-clad pine interiors are the number one problem environment in my working life. The normal workflow is to shoot a frame or two using natural light to obtain a picture that the final exposure will be based on, and then one or more frames using daylight balanced flash bounced off a white ceiling to flood the room with accurately coloured light. Blending the colour and range of tones in post-production creates a final product that doesn’t require a lot of colour correction. Occasionally there are ceilings that have a bit of a colour cast, but these are generally simple to correct as long as you’re shooting RAW files which can be manipulated after they’re taken. Alternatively, colour gels can be attached to the flash units to change the colour of the light being emitted. Dark, pine interiors however - urghh.
I was sent to a holiday let on the Northumberland coast, and didn’t do a quick online search for the property. I almost always do this just to see if there are any issues with interiors or exteriors so I can prepare in advance, but for some reason I hadn’t on this occasion. My window of opportunity to shoot the place was small, as the cleaners were late in turning it around, and the guests were due in shortly. As I opened the front door, my heart sank.
It was a pine-constructed house on two floors with virtually no natural light. The inside was oppressively orange with no plaster anywhere - a nightmare to shoot in a short space of time. Bouncing light off the wooden ceiling results in a room bathed in orange. The flash loses 3 stops of power as it’s so dark also. The only way to shoot these interiors is to use a white shoot-through umbrella out of picture, and raised to the ceiling height. It takes quite a while to set up, and I had no time to do that. In any case, I hadn’t packed any of my 8 foot light stands or brollies. Alternatively, I would employ a flash “globe” which throws white light in all directions. Again, not in my bag that day.
So - I had to use my regular technique to get basic exposures of the rooms, and use some direct flash from outside of the corners of the frame to add bits of white light. Some of the rooms were very dark, and it was a case of trusting that the post-production process would allow me to deliver something that would be acceptable if not perfect. Being devoted to supplying the best images possible is often a hindrance in the basic estate-agency world, and it’s been suggested that I relax my standards in order to speed up and join the ranks of the mediocre. Not happening.
I managed to shoot the five-bedroomed lodge in about 40 minutes, did the exteriors despite the weather piling in, and got out of there before the incoming guests arrived. There was a gigantic pile of what seemed to be human excrement at the side of the house, so I advised the agent and headed home.
The files were orange as hell when imported into Adobe Lightroom. This was definitely going to be a case of compromise, so I went through the flash frames and amended the colour temperature of each one so they were somewhat consistent. I also reduced the orange saturation just slightly. Once the files were in Photoshop, I gave them a few selective colour tweaks, utilised the colours from some of the natural light files, and the final results looked pretty good to be fair.
The car is now permanently kitted out with those things I was missing. You live and learn.
