Help with room photography.

headlandschris

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Chris
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Hi all, newbie here so be gentle! I need to take some photos of guesthouse rooms. I would prefer them to be acurate and not to faffy. I was considering maybe a 360 degree possibly? Any help most welcome.
 
One of the important things is white balance, interior lighting can give you all sorts of colour casts if not corrected. I use a colorchecker passport, it might be overkill if you've just got this one to do, a cheaper grey card would be a good alternative if so.

There tends to be a high dynamic range in interiors shots, from the bright sun coming through the windows to the darkest corner, HDR or exposure blending works well in these cases.

The natural thought is to shoot with an ultrawide lens to get as much in the scene as possible, this brings its own challenges as you'll find you get weird perspectives, curved walls etc. You can sort this issue in one of two ways, one is to buy or rent a tilt shift lens (Perspective Control in Nikon speak), the other is to correct them in post processing, be aware that doing it that way you do lose some quality and resolution, shoot loose so that when the software has cropped in you've not lost important bits.

If you're shooting a stitched panorama you'll need to make allowance for parallax, the usual way is to use a nodal slide so that the shot is rotated about the lens, not the body.

Hope these help.
 
Thanks for reply. I will probably use a HDR approach. I am guessing that establishing the nodal point on a zoom lens (Nikkor 24-70) is more difficult, and would have to be adjusted for each room/adjustment of zoom. ?

As for the colour checker passport what a handy piece of kit, I didn't know such a thing existed. Thanks
 
On FF, the Sigma 12-24 gives over 90° FoV on the long axis. The perspective is (as would be expected) exagerated but distortion is minimal. I'm not sure what their Dx equivalent is like as far as distortions go but it might be worth a try (do any of the hire places rent them out?). I've used mine for hotel room shots; I wedge myself into a corner and brace against the walls to keep myself as stable as possible and up the ISO a bit to get a suitable shutter speed for f/8 or so. Since the shot is of the room, I draw the curtains to exclude as much natural light as possible and turn on all the room's lights as the source(s) - auto WB copes very well but should an excessive cast show up on the review screen, a custom colour temperature can always be used (or of course the issue could be sorted in PP).
 
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