The angels in the detail!

Had a really good house shoot in Glasgow last week for Home Plus Scotland magazine.  The owners are setting up their own interior design and painter & decorators company (Re-decorate) and they certainly have tons of past experience to draw on.  Their home was beautiful with quite a few quirky interesting things to photograph and they made me very welcome too.

The shot above was the main living room and I popped a flash up on a stand just out of the frame camera left to even out the exposure a bit.  I felt that a more flat, even lighting worked best for this room since it was quite ‘deep’ in the sense that the window light fell off a fair bit before it hit the back wall.  A tripod and longer exposure coupled with the flash evened it out nicely.

Another shot I really liked the lighting on…

This one was just natural light.  I did try a touch of flash off to camera right bouncing off the ceiling but it just didn’t need it and I really liked the soft shadows that big window was giving.

This room really was a huge space which I hope comes through on the images.  The piano was quite substantial but even that looked right at home.  I can see why Karlyn & Rob say this is a great party room!

 

Yet again I left a house being jealous of the kitchen :) 

I have a few more pics than normal to post because I took quite a few detail shots.  I always start a shoot with wide angle shots of the rooms and while it still requires alot of thought about composition and whether to light or not, it’s still the detail shots that give you a flavour of what a house, or indeed it’s owners, are really like.

For most of the time I use the 50mm f1.8 lens for the details since it gives me the ability to get really good quality shots at f2.8 and so allows you to be a bit more creative.  I occasionally use my beloved 150mm macro lens but that’s often a bit overkill for what I want.

Here’s a few detail shots that I thought were cool…

The next two shots below are a perfect example of detail shots that give you a flavour of the place and it’s owners.  Karlyn & Rob are creative types and these details of their office space show that I think…

This next shot also shows that they are slightly mental.  It’s an old family heirloom I think and yes, it’s real.  It just seems to work in that room though!

This next shot shows a nice cross section of the colours in the diningroom/kitchen…

Another quirky shot which I love.  This was a hole where an old plug socket used to be so they’ve added a wee door with a ‘home sweet home’ sign on it for the mice…of course!

Another thing I like about the detail shots is the ability to compose a shot that’s a ‘slice’ of a room.  This last shot was one I saw while doing the wide shots but it really needed a closer perspective to get a nice shot out of it.  I’m really happy with it because of the colours, the composition and the lovely natural light.

 

Not too much lighting info in this post since the house was nice and light with not too much contrast to worry about but I got to talk about how important I think detail shots are so it’s all good.  Perhaps I’ll get a lot of my previous detail shots together and do a single post about them.  That’s for another night :)

Cheers
Ian :)