Last week Jodi unveiled the finished home office in her Mirror, Mirror post. She asked me to talk a little bit about how I photographed the space. Shooting in a small office can be challenging, and this one had plenty of challenges to be sure. In order to get a decent sense of the room, you need to a wide-angle lens. For this room I was shooting in the archway that leads to this room.
The biggest challenge in this room was the light. The windows in the office face North East, and are under the front porch overhang. Coupled with the dark wall colour, this room was incredibly dark, photographically speaking. So much so that I would have have been forced open up the aperture more than desirable and shoot at an uncomfortably high ISO, both of which would have negative effects on image quality. To hold the aperture at a minimum of f5.6, and shoot at my ideal maximum ISO of 800, I would have been left with a shutter speed of around 2 seconds. I did give it a try, but despite a decent exposure I just didn’t like the flatness of the light, and I think the covered porch outside the windows was the culprit. If I was an available light only shooter I would have been in trouble (I don’t generally shoot this kind of thing with a tripod). But I have a trick or two up my sleeve. I went for my go to solution for a dark room like this. I used off camera flash to simulate daylight.
You could shoot the flash straight in through the window, but then you would have some bright highlights to deal with. Here is the best part of this trick (and it works with daylight as well), you tape a sheet of white fabric over the window from the outside. This gives you nice even and soft light coming through the window. You can warm up the light by adding some CTO gels to the flash. The sheet on the window trick is invaluable for these situations, I even used the same trick in the reveal of my niece’s bedroom to control the overly bright highlights coming through her bedroom window. The result is a very natural looking bright-afternoon-sun-through-the-window look.
Sometimes it is good to have a trick or two up your sleeve, you never know when you might need it.
Awesome tips Darryl. Thanks for that:)