Holiday home interiors and exteriors

Architectural photography is quickly becoming my favourite work. I still don't really enjoy the process of setting up and taking the photos, but as I get better at it I am starting to find it less of a chore. What I really like, though, is the satisfaction of doing something that I find very difficult and then producing quality photos.

This first pic is a good example of how tastes can differ in this style of photo. The rug wasn't there when I arrived but the client suggested putting it there. When he saw the picture his first reaction was that we should have used a second rug and put something on the table. On the other hand, I'd have preferred to do it without the rug at all. Some people like houses to look "lived in" whereas I prefer the photos to be very stark and empty. Both opinions are equally valid but we've decided to work in my preferred style and I'll be re-shooting this pic without the rug. (Plus I'll close the window this time!)

One of the biggest challenges is avoiding an optical illusion that causes pictures to appear off-angle. In the vertical shot of the kitchen, every vertical is truly vertical but does the picture look slightly clockwise rotated to you?

Sometimes it's impossible to take the photo you want to take. For the exterior pictures of this other house it was essential to show the long garden with several attractive features, but I couldn't find a way to do that without showing something off to one side of the house. Eventually I settled on showing the house next door, but shot from a low angle to cover it with the trees as much as possible. The closer view is a much nicer picture, I think, but the one with the garden had to be done even if it lacked something artistically.

And this is my first HDR shot. High Dynamic Range is a technique that has been around in principle for ages, but its usage is only now becoming common in photography. In brief, you take multiple pictures at different exposures and then merge them together to capture the full range of shadows and highlights, with the added bonus of reducing ISO noise in your shadow areas. This picture was a blend of seven exposures at 1-stop intervals.

HDR isn't always the right choice. I did an HDR shot of the close-up exterior and due to movement it produced a horrible streaking pattern in the clouds and some nasty ghosting around the leaves. I also did an HDR of the other living room and the results were inferior to a single good exposure. But it's a good technique for some pictures and it worked brilliantly for this one.

Here are the seven frames used for the exposure. Obviously these are just the raw frames, once they'd been merged to an HDR that file was then processed and perspective corrected etc.