Interior Photography with Medium Format Cameras

Introduction-

Interior photography is important specially for a new space like an upcoming restaurant or hotel. It is useful for forming a good first impression. One can advertise their space on social media platforms with the use of these images thereby engaging customers. Designers may also want to photograph newly designed homes to showcase it on their portfolios. These images might be required to gain more work and new projects.

Photographing interiors is quite challenging. One has to focus on the alignments and getting all the lines straight. There should not be any distortions specially while photographing small areas.

Professionally photographed interiors is essential for interior designers and architects.

As real estate is constantly expanding and new innovations and architectural developments are being introduced in Singapore, interior photography has become essential in the country.

Lighting is an important factor as photographing spaces indoors or outdoors require a clear image which is visually appealing and well lit. Looking into the lighting for both these spaces is therefore crucial. One might need to get studio lights or flash for indoor spaces and make correct use of natural light in outdoor areas.

Composition is also very important. One has to look into the composition and decide the frame of the image to provide aesthetically pleasing images.

Medium format cameras-

The equipment used in photographing interiors play a vital role.

Medium format cameras have a larger sensor compared to full frame cameras and other DSLRs. They will capture images of better quality and with more information.

Photographing interiors requires more patience and having a detailed plan in mind can achieve better results. This might provide you some time to think about the image and how you want to compose it, what you would want to change, if you want to place things differently or shoot from a different angle.

If you feel that it might be difficult to travel with medium format cameras specially while shooting on location on a large property due to their weight, you need not worry! We have been shooting with the FUJIFILM GFX 50R and GFX 100 and they are not heavy or cumbersome. In fact, they are smaller and lighter than some of the DSLRs. You can move around the space with your medium format camera easily and have your shoot run smoothly.

Shooting with a medium format camera also results in capturing more information and images of much better quality with a higher dynamic range. The colours are beautiful and pleasing.

Key Factors-

Dynamic Range

The dynamic range is an important factor as it helps in achieving more detail in the really bright areas and in the darker areas. Specially while shooting interiors in bright sunlight or at night this might be very important. For example, an image where the indoors are well lit and the scenery outside the window is visible as well, thereby, forming a complete image. One can easily pull out details from darker areas achieving more information and colour.

Multi-Exposure Bracketing

You can also use other techniques to achieve these results such as multi-exposure bracketing. While photographing interiors one should place the camera on a tripod to avoid any camera shakes. The photographer can take multiple shots of the same scene with different exposures. For multi-exposure bracketing, the aperture will remain the same but the shutter speed will change for each image. One should take a minimum of three images. Photographing one under exposed image, one properly exposed image and one over exposed image. These images will later will blended together to form a single image. This could be done using editing softwares such as Photoshop.

Other Factors

While photographing small spaces such as narrow hallways or passages, one might fear the distortions which will make the image look slightly warped and the wide lens might give a fish eye look to the final image which is undesirable. This can be avoided with the choice and use of the right lenses. We use the FUJIFILM medium format cameras with lenses such as the GF 23mm and GF 32-64mm. These lenses are a good choice for interior photography and have definitely helped us in achieving the desired results.

The resolution of the photographs produced by a medium format camera is much higher and it allows you to crop the image to smaller sizes. With the use of this feature you can provide the client with whatever detail they might be looking for from a particular image. For instance, if they want to focus on the flooring you could always crop that portion out of the image.

Conclusion-

In conclusion, we feel that using a medium format camera for interior photography might be little cumbersome but it will definitely has more advantages. It will provide one with better images of high quality. Post processing will be much easier and the photographer will be able to experiment more with the images after shooting. One should try and incorporate the use of medium format cameras for interior photography and would surely not look back!