Nearly every photographer reading this Intel will have an outdoors camera. It works indoors, of course, but it wasn’t designed with interiors in mind. The exposure system is not balanced for the range of lighting in rooms and chambers; the focal length doesn’t suit the typical indoor range; the flash beam is too tight; the minimum focus point is too long and the lens design is more suited to a distant horizon than to the close-to-the-lens parallel lines you find in walls and ceilings. If your camera is digital, it is further hampered by high noise levels at the ISO range generally needed to work indoors. Outdoor cameras don’t usually allow you to tilt and shift the lens relative to the film plane to prevent converging lines, and even though Canon do make such lenses for their SLR range of cameras, no compact or SLR camera offers a similar way to shift the camera back; for that you have to move to a large format “real” indoor camera.
Does that mean you can’t take good photos of interiors? No, but you have adjust your approach to deal with the limitations of your equipment, and master a few extra post processing techniques.
Exposure for the difficult lighting encountered indoors is the number one consideration and obstacle to professional looking interior shots. Without exposure control there is little chance of repeatable success in interior photography. Therefore, selecting a camera that gives you manual control of your exposure should be your first consideration if you anticipate shooting a lot of interiors.
There are several other tools that will help compensate for the shortcomings of the outdoors camera. Having these will make it easier to apply the techniques discussed later in the Intel.
- A good wide angle flash or ability to use external flash
- A tripod
- A level (sometimes built in the tripod)
This is not the same as photographing people or objects in a room: we are trying to photograph the room itself. In a typical room with window and light coloured walls, your camera on its normal setting will try to compensate for the low light levels (compared with outdoors) with flash, resulting in a grey looking image with no snap.
This is a result of the light walls tricking the meter to underexpose. The fix is to override your cameras automatic settings and compensate for the reflections. More advanced cameras have exposure compensation controls, which let you control how much you want to change your exposure relative to what the light meter reads.
The normal setting for this on your camera will be “0”. However, for light walls or bright colours, set it to +1 or higher; that is, add 1 stop or more to the exposure.
This is just a starting point. Your camera and the characteristics of the room may require more or less compensation. Most cameras that allow compensation let you adjust in 1/3 or 1/2 stop steps. You will need to experiment until you get an image with the walls and furniture looking good.
Indoor light, especially after dark, is too low to shoot hand-held without l flash. But flash will drown out the ambient lighting, which is part of the character of the room, an important part of what you want to capture.
You will need a small aperture, say f11 or f22 to ensure adequate depth of field and that means long exposures. Since a flash may drown the natural light, that means using a tripod.
Rooms and houses are designed around light. General design concepts suggest light should come from two sides of a room. If there is a window on only one wall, the light inside the room will be too contrasty. Architects are very careful with windows and artificial lights.
Is it enough to put the camera on a tripod and use a cable release to make a long steady exposure? Sometimes. But there are problems with this approach. While a well designed room may have a pleasing balance of light, it is often too contrasty for the camera to cope with.
Also, different light sources have different colour castes: window light will be warmer (more red) the fluorescent, which tends to be a rather unpleasant green. Incandescent is redder than either, so even with a correct exposure, the different light sources have to be allowed for.
Some specialist photographers replace the bulbs with photofloods. If a closer match to the colour temperature of the window light is needed, the light bulbs through the house may be replaced with electronic flashes.
A more modest approach is to attach a colour correction filter to your lens or adjust the white balance of your digital camera sensor. You may get away with auto white balance, but in mixed light, take a piece of white paper into the room and use this to set a custom white balance (see your camera manual). It is also a good option to shoot in RAW if you camera allows this.
Even with a digital camera's ability to set white balance, you still need to think carefully when combining different light sources. For a film camera, the solution for fluorescent light is a Tiffen FL-D filter.
Couldn’t you just leave the lights off and shoot in the afternoon by window light? Yes, is some small rooms, but it looks much better if you turn all the lights on!
Including windows in the picture is important, but it is rare for a single exposure setting to be right for the interior lighting without washing out the window area. You could draw the curtains, but it is rather nice to show the scene through the window, too. Here is another reason to use a tripod.
Set up the shot and make your interior shot, exposed for the room, not the window. Without changing your focal length or tripod position, adjust your exposure until the image through the window is correct and take a second photo. In post production, you will merge these two images to make the final picture that could not be captured with a single exposure!
This is related to High Dynamic Range photography, but in a very simple form. There are only two images and they are perfectly aligned thanks to the tripod. Without any special software, You can either place them in separate layers (window on the bottom) and cut or erase the window from the top layer, or even copy the correctly exposed window from one picture and paste it into the other.
No matter how careful you are, the nature of interior photography means you will encounter walls, ceilings, door frames and other parallel lines that, in your pictures, seem to converger or spread apart. Without the option of shift and tilt optics and camera backs, your solution is in the computer.
Major software packages like PaintShopPro and Photoshop provide easy solutions. Where the tools are placed depends on your version, but they are usually grouped with the straighten tool and are referred to as “perspective correction”. In effect you lay a reference line along each line which should be vertical or horizontal, and the software pulls them into square with each other.
Beware: if the lines are a long way out of true, you may lose a lot of your image. If this happens, undo the fix and disable the auto-crop function, then redo the perspective correction. You may then be able to use your clone tools to copy the lost areas from the original image (you are working with a copy, aren’t you?!!?) or from another picture of the same room.
There is never a shortage of interiors, so get plenty of practice and you will quickly acquire the skills you need to overcome the shortcomings of owning an “outdoor” camera.
