Interior photography. My first photographt job

Viking · February 25, 2006

Next week Im going to do my first photography work. Im very nervous. I dont get a penny for it. I want to do A great job! Its interior shots they need for a homepage + a 360° panorama, I will shot the panorama in 17 shots with a 18mm lens on a 1.6 crop camera. Thats the widest lens I have. Im sure I will get an 10-22mm lens in a few weeks...

So I want all kind of tips for interior photography. I have googled a bit and dont find any realy good pages.

USAIR · February 25, 2006

Congrats and good luck...I'm sure you will do fine
One thing isn’t it going to be very difficult to do a multi shot pano with a wide lens.
I think the distortion would be hard to handle.

Lets us know how you do

Thanks
Fred

Shay Stephens · February 25, 2006

Viking wrote:

Next week Im going to do my first photography work. Im very nervous. I dont get a penny for it. I want to do A great job! Its interior shots they need for a homepage + a 360° panorama, I will shot the panorama in 17 shots with a 18mm lens on a 1.6 crop camera. Thats the widest lens I have. Im sure I will get an 10-22mm lens in a few weeks...

So I want all kind of tips for interior photography. I have googled a bit and dont find any realy good pages.

Make sure the camera is level for each shot. Use manual exposure and don't use auto white balance, use manual or a preset WB setting so that the frames will be easier to stich together later.

For the pano shot, if you are using a tripod without a pano head, then try to keep objects (furniture, walls, etc) as far away from the lens as is practical. The parallax effect is hard to deal with in some interior shots that are shot handheld or from just a tripod.

That kind of work is labor intensive, and typically pays little to nothing. So going the stitch route is impractical in the long run. Getting a 360 pano in one shot would be preferable. But you need a lot of that kind of work to really justify the equipment expense.

And practice this before actually doing it. Don't let the day of be the first time you have tried it. My advice would be to have at least ten shots done before you show up. That will give you the experience you need to know what you have to do, and give you a better idea of how long all of this takes and if it is worth doing more in the future, and if so, how much you would charge for it.

swintonphoto · March 5, 2006

My recommendations:
1. Make sure the camera is level on all sides.
2. Make sure the interior is lit well enough. If it is too dark, windows will be blown out because of the long/more open exposures.
3. Be confident. You'll do great!

Bandit959 · March 8, 2006

I may be too late for your shoot, but I can offer you some info on 360 deg panoramas.

I'd just like to expand upon Shay's comment a bit .... He's exactly corrent about the WB and manual exposure.

Let me add that you should consider choosing an f-stop/exposure setting and sticking with it as you do a single rotation. If you change them midway through that rotataion, stiching together the image will be more difficult. You'll most likely incur color/contrats issues between images. That means you'll be playing in something like Photoshop trying to match up the colors in the individual images. Not fun.

As Shay points out, the cost of the 360 degree lense is cost prohibitive for most. But there are panoramic heads that will fix to a tripod that will allow you to rotate the camera in fixed increments. There are several rings that get swapped out and these rings are designed for different lenses.

When I've done them, I make several rotations with each set at different f-stop/shutter speed combination. And after I fininsh the sets that I want, I do it again. I view it as cheap insurance.

You may not have the opportunity to shoot in that location again, so I would recommend getting as much content as possible. Have you heard the expresison "drowing in assetts"?

Besides, do you really want to call up the customer and say I want to reshoot?

I use and old Kadian mount and RealViz Stitcher. I'm guessing the cost today would be on the order of $500. But Between the H/W & S/W,
I've found that stitching the images together is trivial.

If you try to use the S/W that comes with say a Canon along with just shooting a bunch of shots at different angles, I suspect that Shay is being kind when he says it's "impractical". It will be labor intensive that way. But for the first time out, I'd say it's an investment in your skillset.

If you're looking for tips on the panorams, I'd suggest looking for info on QuickTime VR's. Not that your end product will be the same, but the QTVR is predicated upon the 360 deg panormara wrapped around in most cases a cylinder. The panaorma is a by product of the process, so to speak.

I hope it goes well!!!!

Interior photography. My first photographt job

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