I rarely find myself short of gear or out of my depth, but a recent job put me in a bit of a fluster once I got there.

Barluga is a chain of bar/restaurant premises in the northeast, and I was asked by a regular commercial estate agent to photograph their Gosforth branch at very short notice. The place was closing down, and the building lease was being offered to other similar businesses. The building is an old church, and I’d never been inside there in my life. It had previously been occupied by the Loch Fyne Seafood restaurant people, and I didn’t know what to expect. I packed my usual stuff plus a 600W Godox light to be on the safe side. I had a very limited time to shoot what was needed and zero brief as usual.

Firstly, I couldn’t gain entry, but eventually found the manager around the back of the building. I had about 30 minutes before the staff went home, so got straight to it. Talk about getting a sweat-on.

My heart sank when I walked into the main body of the building. It was cavernous. The space was dark and gigantic, with a 60ft high wooden ceiling, a massive staircase leading to a mezzanine bar, and an overwhelming dark atmosphere punctuated by bright tungsten lights and the added bonus of sunlit stained glass windows on all sides. My lights (in fact any lights) were useless in this environment. I had to make a plan of action quickly because there was no time and this needed to be a quality listing. HDR was my only solution.

Modern HDR photography involves taking a bunch of exposures from highly underexposed to highly overexposed then utilising special software to blend all of the exposures to produce a final image that includes all of the tones and looks natural. In real estate photography, this is achieved by taking 5 separate photos at 2 stops apart from each other, and the key is getting the middle exposure right. In this case I set the aperture to f8, and estimated my mid-range shot to be 1/8th of a second. My Camranger software allows this to be controlled from the iPad, so it took frames at 2 sec, 1/2 sec, 1/8th, 1/30th, & 1/125th. For a bit of oomph I also did some full-power flash pops on bits of furniture and wooden areas that could be utilised later to add some atmosphere. I captured all the big spaces in this fashion, then did the kitchen, booths, and bar service areas plus some details using flash as I normally would.

I managed to get everything done in a timely fashion and did some exteriors from the roof level car park on the other side of the high street. Back at base I used the Lightroom HDR processing feature to get something half decent together and finished the files off in Photoshop by adjusting the colours and levels of the light and dark tones.