The Clubhouse at The Manor Apartments, Atlanta.
(Reposting a blog from four years ago.)
As a small-market professional photographer for most of my working life, I had to deal with a wide variety of genres and be reasonably proficient in all, or at least most, of them. Advertising photography, product photos, location photography for annual reports and corporate brochures, business and personal portraits, weddings, architecture and interiors, editorial photography for magazines, photographing and writing audio-visual productions -- one never knew what the next project might be. And I enjoyed it all. Just about everything was an interesting challenge. One of the things I especially enjoyed about commercial photography is that it's an endless sequence of interesting problems to solve, but if I failed to solve them the world would not end.
Of course, if I had failed very often to solve them my career might have come to an untimely end.
But I mostly solved them, and enjoyed the process.
One area in which this is especially true is photography of interiors, which is all about staging and lighting. Usually the interior designer or an art director handled the staging, but the lighting problems were mine and mine alone to solve.
However, in the photo of the clubhouse at The Manor Apartments in Atlanta, I was on my own. No interior designer, no art director. But staging was easy -- I just moved a few chairs and pillows around and turned on some lights. Lighting was fairly simple also. I always carried a compact case with three portable studio strobe lights. I set one at camera position and the other two on the right side, about ten feet apart. They are hidden by the leaves of the tall plant on the right edge of the photograph.
That by the way, is an example of simple problem-solving. If you want to hide something from the camera, use some sort of found object that looks as if it would naturally be where it is -- in this case, the plant, which I moved into that position. It was originally much farther to the right and out of the picture.
I like this photo and have used it in my architecture portfolio, but it has one glaring fault which you would probably not notice if I didn't point it out -- there's no fire in the fireplace! If I had balled up a few sheets of newspaper and lit them in the fireplace it would have made the room come alive in a way that it doesn't now.
That probably wouldn't have happened if a designer had done the staging, but apparently that was something the building contractor didn't budget for.
My camera for this project was the Pentax 6x7, with the wonderful 45mm lens. Film, as always, was Fujichrome 100 in 120 size.
Probably the greatest of all architectural and interior photographers, and one of my heroes, is Julius Shulman, who retired in his mid-80s, got bored after awhile, and went back to work until his death at age 99, going around with a walker and an assistant to carry his camera.
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Photography and text copyright 1999-2025 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
Dave, you have a good eye for light. I see how you could make a living in photography. 😊
ReplyDeleteThank you, Greg. Unfortunately, photographic ability is not the most important ability in a professional photographer's life. Sales ability is much more important, and I sucked at that. So I consider my career to have been moderately successful, artistically; financially, not so much.
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