Art of Lighting

Interior photography pose its own challenges.

Firstly, getting the contrast right is a trial and error method. By this, I mean not letting the required details in the dark parts of the photograph vanish in the darkness and at the same time keeping the highlights not burnt is a big challenge. Luckily there are pre-shoot processes and post-shoot processes that eases the task to a certain level.

Second, there are issues of different color temperature lights acting on the subject (objects inside the room). To get a balanced view, different options from correcting the temperature in the camera to turning off certain lights or closing the screen/blinds will have to be tried.

Third and the most important of all is the distractions. Too many things in the room, the viewer’s eye wander around the photograph to settle. Too little things, the photograph becomes uninteresting to the viewer. So keeping an balance in the photograph is necessary.

Here are my attempts at interior photographs:

Dining table

Family room

Master Bedroom

House entrance

This series of photos of the BAPS Temple near Aurora, IL was taken sometime back in early summer of 2009. The day was pleasant with good sunlight for outdoor.

The temple has amazing architectural work involved, but has no photography policy inside the temple. So these outdoor pictures are the ones that one can use to image the amount of work that would have gone in to build it…

Now some photos :-

Front View

Full View

Side View

Cathedral of Saint Paul, MN was the dream of Archbishop John Ireland who secured the site in 1904. The construction started in 1907 and went on for decades. You can see why it would have taken decades. Situated on the highest point of Saint Paul city @ Summit Hill, it stands 306ft tall with a seating capacity for nearly 3000 people.  It is a true piece of French architechture built very futuristically taking ventillation, heating, accoustics, accessibility etc into consideration.

OK. Enough with the history, lets see some photographs.

This one taken at night with an exposure of 20sec and a fisheye lens.

This one is taken from the steps at the entrance. These exterior is all granite from Saint Cloud, MN.

The Sanctuary with a 4 sec zoom out exposure.

The last one is a combination from 24 different photographs. It has 8 different angles with 3 exposures each combined to give a HDR. All these 8 HDR images are then woven together to get the 180º field of view both horrizontally and vertically. HDR is necessary here since there is electrical lighting and windows that let sunlight in at near the top that had exposures ranging from +0.5 to +1.5ev and at the vertical bottom there are dark woodden chairs which contribute to -1.0 to -2.0ev. So I had to compromise on the exposure a bit and take a +1.0ev, 0ev and -1.0ev for the HDR with Photomatix. Photoshop CS4 did the trick for stiching together the 8 different HDR tiffs.

During my recent visit to India, went to Thrissur, Kerala, a beautiful city often called the cultural center of Kerala, with perfect balance between greenery & concrete and rural & urban population. During the stay at the Hotel, found this amazingly huge Cathedral. Here are 2 photographs of the same at different times of the day.

From there, the adventure began and we were travelling to Kuruva Island. It’s a beautiful set of small islands held by Tourism department. A guide walked us through a small group of 4 islands covering a 2km route.

After wading through knee deep water and trekking through tough rocks for 2km, we ended up in this big island where we found a bamboo house built to watch wildlife.

This flower is not just the symbol of a national party in India, but also the symbolizes the “progress of the soul” per Buddhism. Never mind that, but the photo opportunity was awesome.

The Banasura dam, largest earth dam in India, was amazingly wide. At the end of the dam, there was speed boating where I shot this picture.

Then the incredible Soochipara Falls. It was a trip downhill containing steps and a little bit of hike, the cascading falls was amazing.

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Muthanga wildlife sanctuary was another story. After a long ride in an open jeep through the dusty red soil, we finally were able to see some wild elephants. But the rememberable event from the ride which made us skip the next wild life santuary in the plan, was the dust which had settled all over us and my camera. I had to spend hours the day after cleaning all the equipment.

It was 6 in the morning and I headed east for 19th Annual Hot air affair Feb 2nd. The school ground was packed with pick-up trucks and balloon laid flat.

Slowly one by one got filled with lighter than air stuff and they began to fill the sky with colorful resins. Here are some pictures!