Bringing a classic yet new look to renovated spaces and photographing challenging rooms which were never really shot.
Sometimes the biggest challenges come in the form of the biggest rooms, and sometimes they come with the red carpet.
Heralded as the largest and grandest of the Newport Mansions, The Breakers is the crown jewel in the Preservation Society of Newport County’s iconic collection of Gilded Age properties. It was an absolute pleasure and enormous challenge to capture these spaces in new and exciting ways. Photographing the Breakers took a full week of shooting at both sunrise and sunset, to utilize the natural light along with all the technical lighting tricks available.
For me shooting spaces like this the challenge is to keep it looking real and to let the existing light speak, so to speak. To do this most scenes were shot in HDR, short for high dynamic range – meaning several exposures are shot but spaced in brightness to include both the darkest and lightest elements of the scene. These images are blended together and with a careful eye for keeping it realistic the images are edited to show the sun beams just a bit brighter than the ambient illumination. In actuality they are much brighter, like 30 times, but we’re making pictures so if it looks good it is good! For the tech savvy – I use a lot of masks with range filters. Meaning I’m filtering for a range of luminosity (or brightness) but sometimes for a color range. Once these masks are affecting just the area of brightness or color I want it is possible to pull down the brights of things like the sunlit areas. Of course for this to really work you need that very dark version of the scene in your set of HDR images.
With some rooms, like the Library in particular, it’s not sunlight I’m trying to blend with but the existing artificial light. The challenge in this kind of scene is making my added lighting appear as though the building’s own lights are doing all the work. In reality, the dark nooks and crannies are often 10 to 30 times darker than I’d like. While I do use the HDR process here as well, I find it better to add enough light, and in a big space that’s a lot.
I use 1000WS strobe heads—sometimes as many as five—along with a variety of light modifiers. There is always a large softbox for fill, but I also use bare bulbs and grid spots to shape the light. The primary trick in all of this is adjusting the color temperature of the strobes so they feel natural when I choose my final white balance. My style is to keep the images looking warm, as if the incandescent lighting were doing all the work. In reality, I set a white balance that’s leaves the incandescents looking quite warm, while rendering my strobe light just slightly warm of neutral. It’s like cooking with spices—over time, you develop an intuitive feel for it.
Another classic strobe-lighting technique involves shutter speed. Since strobe lighting fires almost instantaneously, the camera’s shutter speed has little to no effect on it. By adjusting aperture and shutter speed as if they were two independent lighting channels, I can balance my strobes and the building’s existing lights—not just in brightness, but also in their ratio to each other and the overall scene. The key is capturing the right shots so my style of post-processing achieves the look I want. I can usually brighten things significantly, but once highlights are completely blown out, they’re gone. So, managing the brightest spots and glare of the existing lighting becomes the biggest constraint—keeping everything looking natural while preventing large pure white areas. (In reality, when you can clearly see shadow details, the lights themselves are usually blown out.)
These images were shot in January of 2022 with the exception of Gertrude Vanderbilt’s room which was completed in July 2022. The exterior was done in April and the façade in October. The October shoot was interesting, we needed to wait till a slow season but also get the late afternoon light to be raking across the façade, it was the best we could find for the the time window we had – another reality of architectural photography!
Here are some other examples of my other architectural photography jobs.
The Loggia was essentially a landscape shoot, I really wanted to have the magic sense of sunrise. It was a February morning and about 17 degrees but any hint of that I hid from the final image by adding a little warmth and a lot of fill light. Strobes with gels are mixing into the light to illuminate the otherwise silhouetted interior space.
I shoot tethered for most of these type shoots. A lot of time goes into moving furniture and controlling the light. I want to be sure I’m seeing it all. As much as I love to move around with the camera the reality of HDR shooting nails the camera in one spot and therefor tethering is simple to add on.
A big place like this can have many light sources so often grab some color checker shots to help decode anything that is giving me problems in post. Generally in post I like to go by eye and I don’t worry what the actually K is on the white balance but it is possible to get a bit off track in a room with say a red carpet or green walls.