I need a little room to breathe
Originally published 8 April 2018
As discussed in a previous post, I spent some time out of town for work last month. It was over a week's worth of hotel stays where I was just too tired to do anything after work. And being cooped up in hotel rooms there wasn't much for me to shoot.
So, I thought, well why not just shoot in the hotel! I tried doing some real-estate type photography, or whatever you call taking photos of interiors.
From watching YouTube videos, I learned that you need three main things for good indoor photos:
Wide-angle lens
A tripod
Flash/Lighting
I had maybe half a tick out of those three. I didn't have a tripod, didn't have a decent flash unit, and my widest lens comes in at a 30mm full frame equivalent. I've read that the best range is around 12-24mm. So yeah, a few handicaps right off the bat. But let's see what I could manage despite those challenges...
I guess the main issue really is the lighting. Not being able to fit in a lot of the room into the picture could be mitigated by simply taking more photos of specific items and areas. If the light sucks, however, it's not going to look that inviting to stay at a place. Some examples to study:
A flash would have lit up the foreground to balance out the incoming light from the big windows.
Brighter is better. I turned up the exposure compensation to brighten up the image a bit, but you can see how the light from the window is too bright now.
Same deal here - a flash or two would have helped even out the light. That's not to say natural light on its own couldn't work, but I'd have to know how to balance the exposure properly. On a side note that couch doesn't help the aesthetics at all.
I also tried some more creative angles but they turned out pretty average.
By the time I got to Dunedin I've had a bit of practice and time to reflect. So I took a picture of my last hotel room to sum up the lesson. Not too bad considering the aforementioned limitations.
It was a good exercise all around and at the very least I learned that this type of photography isn't really my jam.
I did do some walking around in Dunedin while I was there but the weather limited my opportunities. I didn't have many photos to write home about but I did take another decent flower pic for the collection.