Photographing Houses and the Window Glow Technique

(c) 2013 The Image Fix - all rights reserved

Photographing houses sounds like a simple deal. It is very easy to do. Very easy to do badly, that is. When photographing a house, be it for pleasure, or real estate advertising, really showing a property at its best is going to be your objective. In this post I will show you how to get really eye-catching photos of houses, shopfronts or schools, in fact virtually any building. There are two major considerations you will need to handle. These are: perspective and lighting.

1. Perspective

Most houses have more than one floor and unless you are 10 ft tall, perspective is going to be an issue. The closer you are to the building the worse the problem is going to be. The problem manifests as what is commonly termed 'converging verticals', that being the tendency for the vertical lines in the structure to 'lean' backwards, and converge towards the top of an image, due to the simple geometrical fact that the higher parts of the building are further away from your camera. So how do you deal with it?

a) with a perspective correction or perspective control (PC) lens. A 'one shot' solution, but a costly one - PC lenses typically cost several times the cost of their non-PC equivalents. PC lenses work by moving the front elements parallel to the rear elements, providing some of the utility of a view camera's movements. It goes without saying, you can of course, just use a view camera, if you have an assistant, plenty of time and a few hundred to spend on film.

b) The modern way to deal with perspective problems is called Adobe Photoshop. Edit>Transform>Perspective is the menu route to take.

These two images (of the same shot) demonstrate the perspective problem. It was taken with the Sigma DP1, handheld. In the first the house is leaning back and what should be vertical lines are converging inwards towards the top.

After a quick correction in Photoshop, the edges of the building are close to vertical. It's neat and tidy, sharp and bright, but it lacks a bit of soul.

 

 2. Window Glow

The issue of lighting is personal, but there is a very simple technique you can use to really make your house photos pop. I call it the window glow technique. It's pretty easy to understand why. The trick is simply this, to balance the intensity of the light falling on the house, with the intensity of light emerging from the artificial sources inside the house. A moment's consideration will tell you that natural light is many times stronger than common domestic lighting. Hence the time for this technique to work is around sunset (or sunrise) just as the sun is starting to dip over the horizon, or has just dipped over. Too early and the light inside the house will be imperceptible. Too late, and the exterior of the house will be too dark. That gives you only a short window of opportunity to get your shot. The closer you are to the equator, the shorter this period will be. In average temperate latitudes, this pre-dusk sweet spot lasts about 15 minutes tops.

For this reason it is important to set up all you need to get ready for the shot, well before the sunset (or sunrise if you want to do it in the morning). That's going to include setting up your camera for the best angle, switching on and positioning the lights inside the house, opening curtains and shutters and removing obstructions. A steady tripod is also a real bonus; not because hand-held stability is going to be a problem - modern image stabilisation and high ISO performance avoids this problem, but a tripod is useful because a. it enables you to fix your favourite field of view while you go off to move a curtain; and b. because you can get a succession of exposures at different light levels that you may then use to composite your image should you so wish. I might also add, that if you are an IQ purist, a tripod is going to let you shoot at the 100 ISO and f/8 you love. The technique is eminently possible without a tripod, but expect to shoot at f/4-f/5.6, ISO 400-800.

I strongly recommend shooting in RAW, as this will give you much flexibility when treating your final image. To paraphrase Ansel Adams, the RAW file is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

3. Prep

You will have hear me say it too often, but preparation for a photo, as in anything, is crucial. Treat your model, oh yes, your house is a model too, with the same care and attention as you would Heidi Klum. She needs a wash and brush up and a little make-up before she's ready for lens time. You'll be saving yourself time retouching anyway, so make sure the floor is litter free, the windows are clean, cables are out of the way, and the curtains and blinds are all open. You can also creatively position furniture for compositional strength. Two of the most powerful elements in this regard, I find, are grand pianos and chairs. Maybe it's their shape, but it's mostly probably a psychological invitation to enter the scene which is most powerful. A chair says, "this could be you, here". Vehicles and bikes are other props you may wish to consider as long as they add compositionally to the shot and don't remove attention from the star.

As regards lighting, you can almost always get away with the regular light fittings of a house. The more light you can switch on the sooner you will get to that crucial balance point, however, so another possibility is to bring in extra light to buy you a couple of extra gigawatts of sunlight on the outside of your building. You can use industrial floods, tungsten studio lights or halogen builders lights that you can pick up for a fiver at any hardware store. This also gives you the opportunity to adjust light temperature with the addition of blue-coloured gels.

4. Recap

1. Find your angle and set up your tripod
2. Prepare your model.
3. Wait for the sun to drop and start shooting
4. Shoot RAW!
5. Keep shooting at intervals until you have passed the sweet shot of perfectly balanced light

 

5. Post-processing

The beauty of RAW is you have total flexibility with white balance. Experiment with the presets till you get the right one. N.B. due to the nature of the scene you are going to have WB conflict issues. Outdoors you are going to have cool natural daylight and emerging from inside (unless you have used flood lights with blue gels), the warm shades of tungsten. This is not a problem. Personally I find a gentle amber glow to be tremendously appealing and it gives the subject a real welcoming 'warm' look.

If you find the tungsten too 'hot' for your tastes you can follow these easy steps in PS:

1. Create a new layer.
2. Make a selection around all the windows and doorways in question.
3. Save your selection so you can come back to it later if needs be. Select>Save Selection.
4. In Image>Adjustments>Levels, move the sliders to cool down the light. Alternatively use Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation.

6. The Final Result

So here is the final image, with perspective corrected in Photoshop and light balanced for the window glow effect. Shot handheld f/4.5, ISO 400 with the Panasonic Lumix GF1.

 

Notice we haven't lost any detail on the exterior of the building. The brick work is all clear the shadows are not losing detail, and we have the pleasant glow from the windows we were looking for. The house has finally come 'alive'.