Photographing Rooms

Blogging has challenged me to be a better photographer.  It can be both fun and frustrating ~ sometimes simultaneously!  I am constantly inspired by pictures I see on other blogs and in magazine articles.  Along with the inspiration, though, comes frustration over not being able to do it as well.  I’m learning the biggest thing for me is to be persistent in learning and to just keep on snapping more pictures.  That’s the beauty of digital.  Hitting the “delete” button doesn’t cost me any money!

An “ah ha” moment came last week when I was working on photographing the Fall Living Room.  Lighting is the most difficult piece of the photography puzzle for me.  When I’m photographing an object, I try moving it around to different areas and snap the picture from different angles.  However, it’s slightly more difficult to move an entire room to a suitable lighting situation!

This time, I decided to do an experiment.  I chose different times of day to shoot pictures and was looking for the “sweet spot” time of light.  I didn’t use the flash for any of them.  {All pictures are unedited.}

Here was the room in early afternoon {f/11; ISO 1000; 1/30}:

in afternoon

…in the evening before sunset {f/18, ISO 3200, 1/13}:

evening

The next morning at 9:30 a.m. {f/4.5, ISO 200; 1/80}:

Fall living room after 2

and one hour later {f/10, ISO 200, 1/8}:

1 hour later

Well, hello, 9:30 a.m.!   Although I had to shut one set of curtains to filter out the direct sunlight, the overall effect was bright and cheery.  I also broke down and pulled out the tripod for the last two photos and locked the ISO into 200 to get a clearer picture. {Something I should be doing all the time, I realize!}

I included all the “numbers” for the shots for those of you who actually understand what they mean.  I sort of do, but am still working on that.  I shoot in “Aperture” priority mode and fiddle with the f-stop number as well as the exposure {+ and –} number.

If you’re like me and would love to learn more about photography, here are some articles you may find helpful:

Miss Mustard Seed’s “Growing as a Photographer

Dear Lillie’s “Easy Tips for Photographing Food

My 3 Boybarian’s “31 Days of Photo Tips”

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One Comment

  1. Thank you so very much! I am still trying to figure out how to use the manual setting on my camera and have yet to figure out how to set everything…. in fact last time I really buggered things up and it took a while to get the camera back to “factory” settings. (still don’t know what i did, haha!)

    Thank you for sharing as this too is my biggest challenge. Due to our house’s set up I really only have a couple of places to photograph “things” and numerous of our rooms have poor lighting situations but I will keep working on it until we can finally get a good picture!

    Have a great day!

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