Tight spaces
Shooting in tight spaces is one of the real challenges when capturing interior spaces in this country. It seems that rooms are getting smaller and smaller with each set of new-builds, and the prospect of shooting a 5 bedroom on a new estate can send me into paroxysms of sweaty fear – all the developers are doing is taking the space previously allocated to a 2-bed property, adding partition walls to divide it into smaller spaces, then hiking the price up by 6o%. Often, I can’t physically fit a camera on a tripod into a corner to photograph a room if there is any furniture at all in the space. Ludicrous.
Anyway, working to size restraints is all part of the game, and even more so when shooting PR gigs or products in the working environment. I used to shoot staged shots of shop-wall mockups at Barbour’s Head Office in South Shields. One tiny room was dedicated to being a space in which all the visual merchandising setups – shelving, racks, tables etc, were created, and photographed for use in the company VM standards manual – with shop layouts rolled out to all the retail outlets in the UK and abroad. Freelance stylist Paula Carney, and VM chief Julian Ash were in charge of creating the displays, then I would shoot them. Sounds simple, except that the room was tiny, full of stuff, devoid of power, and had a ceiling so low that it could be touched. This presented challenges if all sorts. I had to shoot relatively close to the subject matter, necessitating the use of a wider lens than would be normally used, thus introducing distortion to the shots that had to be dealt with in post production. Lighting needed to be as flat as could be managed, with two large softboxes, and a flash bounced off the ceiling and floor to counter any dark shadows above and below the displays. The images below show the dimensions of the room, and the subsequent difficulty of creating something excellent. I ended up using a 24mm shift lens, generally used in architecture, to allow me to keep the vertical lines straight while keeping the camera close to the subject. The images were generally cut out from the background for placement in the manual.
Setting up product shoot in the same building were a common occurrence in addition to the VM work carried out regularly. I generally had a corner of the warehouse space to utilise, and scrounged ladders, tables, and bits of wood to assist in the set-building process. Some of my nicest product shots were shot in this space – an area which was subject to the mercies of the climate of the moment, whether it be sub-zero or oven-like depending on the season. The bottom image shows my stylist Vikky prepping a £1000 To Ki To wax jacket using a specially made hanging system using bendy wire to get the arms into weird positions.
Working for years in these environments – here, and in many other places, under tight space restrictions has been a valued experience – providing invaluable experience which can be called upon to allow me to find a way to shoot pretty much anything in any environment. The results from one of the VM shoots in the little room can be seen below.
