Photographing in tight and shiny places
According to the website Houzz, kitchens are the most popular and expensive renovation project. Last year I photographed several kitchens designed by Bolitta Kitchen in New York City and Westchester, NY for their advertising campaigns.
The kitchens were not specifically built for the photoshoot. They were all location designs at client’s homes, and that’s where things can get tricky.
Tight Space
Kitchens are usually not the biggest room in a home. Some of them are quite small which makes it often difficult to avoid wide angle lenses. Why not wide angle lenses? Wide angle lenses will make whatever is closest to the lens, or closest to the edge of the frame, disproportionately larger than the rest. Round ceiling pendants will look oval and a cabinet door might look bigger than it actually is.
Real estate photographers love to use wide angle lenses and they use this effect to their client’s advantage by giving the impression that rooms are bigger than they actually are. That doesn’t work for advertising photography.
It doesn’t matter how expensive the lens or camera is. The perceptual distortion is just physics. So why high end professional lenses, if they all have the same distortion? Consumer grade wide angle lenses have excessive barrel and/or pin-cushion distortion which often can’t be corrected in post-production. And the number one rule in architectural photography is: Vertical lines have to be straight and vertical, and horizontal lines have to be straight and horizontal. Only exception: The Tower of Pisa. Consumer lenses also suffer from a visible lack of edge sharpness. Things will get fuzzy around the edges.
I mainly use specialized tilt shift lenses. They also have the additional advantage of letting me change the focal plane, or change the field of view without having to tilt the camera, which causes verticals to not be vertical anymore. Some would say it can be corrected in photoshop. Correct, but I will have to crop the image. So, the wide angle lens isn’t that wide anymore in the end, but I will still have to deal with the perceptual distortion issue.
And there is often limited space in kitchens to place the camera and add lighting. I often wish I could move walls to get more space for the camera.
Reflections
Kitchens are full of reflections. Stainless steel appliances are everywhere. Sometimes even the kitchen island is made out of stainless steel. Glossy cabinetry is also a challenge. There aren’t too many places to put the camera to begin with. Circular Polarizers, additional flash pops, and blocking ambient light helps to control reflections, but in most cases post-production is the only way to tackle this issue, and I have to make sure I have the digital assets to fix things in Photoshop that can’t be fixed on site. In all of my interior design shoots, I view images on a large iPad or Macbook. There is no way I can recognize problematic reflections on the back of a camera.
Photographing the client’s intent
My goal is to photograph the designer’s and architect’s intent. My job is not to document how people live. That’s a big difference in how to approach a photoshoot. And that’s where styling comes into play.
We take iPhone pictures of the kitchen and remove everything from the counters, open shelves, and cabinets with glass doors, and then we carefully style the kitchen for each individual image keeping advertising formats and negative space for copy in mind. Usually, less is more. All the kitchen accessories in the images are brought in for the shoot by the stylist. And then everything that was removed from the kitchen has to be put back.
Usually it’s best to get those photoshoots done right before or after the owner has moved in. The longer the owner has lived in the home the longer it takes to style it for a photoshoot.
Enough backstory, here are some final images from a Bilotta Kitchen photoshoot.
