Interior photography

What the place looks like

Restaurants, hotels, homes and offices: work on location and full processing — straight verticals, windows that keep their view, one colour of light in a space lit by three sources. Files ready to publish.

More work

Other shoots

All photography projects 7

Why it matters

What separates a photograph of a space from a photographed space

  1. Verticals that stand up

    Point a wide lens upward and the walls lean inward. It is the most recognisable tell of an amateur interior shot. Cured by keeping the sensor plane vertical when shooting and correcting the perspective after — not by hoping nobody notices.

  2. Windows that are not holes

    A room and its windows are several stops of exposure apart. One frame gives either a white rectangle or a dark room; blending several gives both the room and the view through the glass — what the eye actually saw.

  3. One colour of light

    An interior mixes daylight, tungsten and LED: one corner drifts orange, another blue. Colour is corrected by area, not with one global slider — or the wood stops being wood.

  4. Lines that stay straight

    A wide lens bends what is straight, and an interior is made of straight lines. Distortion is removed by profile before any other edit: every following correction inherits the previous error.

  5. Camera at the right height

    From standing height a restaurant looks like a floor plan. Most spaces read from the eye level of somebody seated, square to one of the walls — a first-five-minutes decision no retouching brings back.

  6. The room, tidied

    Cables, bins, spare chairs, a crooked napkin. Moving them on site is a minute, in retouching an hour — so they are moved on site. What cannot be moved is removed in the file.

None of this shows in one frame. It shows when a dozen frames sit on a page together and the place looks like the same place in all of them — that is the job.

How a shoot runs

Six stages, most of them before the camera

  1. Brief

    What the frames are for. A booking site, a menu, a listing and an interiors award ask different frames of the same room.

  2. Scout

    When the light is right, which windows fight you, what gets moved and what gets switched on. This is what decides the time of day the shoot happens.

  3. Shoot

    Tripod, level, bracketed exposures, room after room. Slower than it looks — and the reason the files behave predictably later.

  4. Selection

    A first cut of everything shot goes out for your choice — before hours of retouching sink into frames nobody wanted.

  5. Correction

    Perspective, distortion, exposure blending, colour by area, clean-up. Most of the hours are spent here — and the difference shows here.

  6. Delivery

    Finished files in the sizes and crops you need, with the rights agreed at the start. The delivery date is agreed before the shoot.

What you receive

Files ready to publish

  1. Finished files

    Full-resolution JPEGs, corrected and retouched, plus web sizes ready to upload. Not a folder of raw frames left for you to sort.

  2. Cropped for where they go

    One frame works differently in a site header, a booking listing and a square post. Crops are made deliberately, so nothing important is left outside the edge.

  3. Rights to use them

    Written permission covering the site, the listings, the advertising and print. Agreed before the shoot — nothing left to negotiate when a campaign is due.

Also shot

The rest of the camera work

  1. Dishes

    What is served in that room: square frames on black, one style across the whole service, readable down to a card in a delivery app.

  2. Product photography

    The same discipline applied to things that are not edible: catalogue frames shot to one specification so a whole range looks like a range.

Questions

Before you write in

A single room is a couple of hours; a restaurant or a hotel floor is most of a day, because the light is waited for rather than fought. Retouching is quoted separately from time on site: it is the larger part of the work.

For the architectural frames, yes: an empty room photographs as a room. Frames with people are shot separately and deliberately — a half-empty restaurant reads as a failing one.

Often that is the point. Warm interiors sell themselves after dark, when the fittings do the work — the frame at the top of this page is an evening one. A harder shoot, and worth it.

Perspective, colour and clean-up — yes. What cannot be repaired after the fact is a blown window, a wrong camera height and a hopelessly noisy file — which is why the shoot matters more than the retouching.

Yes. Spherical panoramas for virtual tours are a format of their own, with their own setup and light; the portfolio holds a panoramic shoot of a fitness centre. The format is agreed in the brief.

Yes, and for a restaurant that is the usual order: the room is shot before opening, the dishes when the kitchen is ready to serve. One visit, two sets of files. More about shooting dishes — on the food photography page.

Yes. In Kharkiv there is no travel charge; a shoot in another city is agreed before booking, together with the estimate.

Start

Book a shoot

What the space is, roughly how big, and what the frames are for. That is enough to name the timing and the cost.

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