Photographing Interiors

The Clubhouse at The Manor Apartments, Atlanta

Pentax 6x7, 45mm Takumar lens, Fujichrome film

(Click to enlarge)

Blog Note #1: Thanks to all who expressed concern and prayers for Louise. The surgery to fuse vertebrae in her neck and remove bone cysts that were pressing on the nerve root went well. She is currently sitting in her hospital bed making phone calls and writing text messages. She will come home Thursday if all continues to go well.

Blog Note #2: I'm sorry to be late with this post. The campground wifi is unreliable, so I've mostly been connecting with the internet via Bluetooth with my cell phone hot spot. That seems to have quit working. We switched from Consumer Cellular to T-Mobile because they offered unlimited data. It worked well at first, but is now hardly working at all. I have to find another way to connect with the internet.

 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 well have come to an early 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 carry 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.

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.

Photograph copyright David B. Jenkins 2021

I post three times a week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone 

Tags: photography, architecture, Pentax, Takumar, Fujichrome, film, Atlanta, Manor Apartments, studio strobe lighting