How To Photograph Real Estate, Interiors, And Architecture: Where Art Meets Architecture

After over six months in production, I am happy to announce that my tutorial 'Where Art Meets Architecture: How To Photograph Real Estate, Architecture, and Interiors' is finally available! I partnered up with Fstoppers.com to create a comprehensive eight-hour tutorial which covers so many facets of architectural and interior shooting.  I wanted to give my readers and followers the first chance to purchase the tutorial, which is available for $299 (click here), before it goes open to the public, pending Fstoppers.com's migration to a new server this week.

I will explain each and every technique that I use to produce my photographs. The full photography tutorial is broken down into three chapters, each covering the tools necessary to succeed in the different niche markets within the field of interior photography. So no matter if you are an experienced photographer or have never taken your camera out of auto mode, I'll take you from shooting basic bedrooms all the way through my complicated light-painted exteriors. 

We've created a ten-minute trailer for the tutorial, which breaks down everything inside it and gives a brief look into my workflow, which can be seen here:

Here's what I cover throughout the tutorial:

Real Estate Photography: In the Real Estate section, I take the time to teach you everything you need to know about this genre so you can kick start your career and start producing images for real estate agents, listing agents, and general property management. All of the basics will be covered in this chapter including:

• How to get started with minimal gear
• How to bounce flash effectively
• Using natural light to your advantage
• Properly composing your frame
• Choosing the correct focal length
• How to retain exterior window views
• Two, three, and four light setups
• Correcting pincushion and barrel distortion
• Fixing converging lines in Photoshop
• Creating a final image completely in camera

 
In addition to getting started, I'll also talk candidly about how I have found success in the real estate market, and how you too can build a money making business shooting properties for sale.

Architecture and Interior Photography: This chapter focuses on how to create photographs for higher paying clients like architects, home builders, interior designers, and magazine editorials. With the ground work already laid down, I will focus on streamlining your workflow and pushing your images into actual works of art. While on location at an actual architect’s personal home, I'll take you step-by-step through eight flagship images from initial capture all the way through the final photoshop editing process. We have also included a full Photoshop PSD file of a twilight exterior images so you can follow along as we go through photoshop.

• Twilight Exterior Technique
• Advanced light painting and compositing
• Tethering to an ipad/iphone
• Using scrims  and flags to control reflections/specular highlights
• The “Moody Interior Twilight Shot”
• Faking warm sunlight
• Staging furniture for strong compositions

Commercial and Advertising Photography: In this final section, I'll take you on the set of two commercial spaces and demonstrate how to produce perfect images for restaurants, hotels, wedding venues, resorts, and other commercial clients. Emphasis will be placed on meeting your clients needs and lighting images according to the use of the space.

• Creating twilight images while a restaurant is open for business
• Incorporating people into your photography
• Lighting multi room locations
• Replacing details in Photoshop
• Lighting large banquet halls
• How to create an inviting atmosphere

 
In addition, I also touch on commercial project pricing, licensing, and dealing with clients in a way that keeps everyone happy and creative energy high.

If you are interested in purchasing the DVD, you can click here, which will take you to our e-junkie store, where it is available for $299, which in my opinion is a great value. I have watched it a few times and every time I watch it I think about what a steal it is! It took me years to figure all of this out and to hone my craft to the point that its at today. Unfortunately, my partner, Fstoppers.com has been absolutely slammed with traffic from a few of our posts that went viral, which we are working on getting fixed right now, and I am releasing this to just my loyal followers until it goes public at the end of the week.

I hope you like what you see - we've gotten a handful of glowingly positive reviews from watchers, which is great to see after all of the work that went into it. If you have any questions at all, feel free to shoot me an email or reply to this post and I'll get back to you!

Upcoming Architectural Photography Tutorial DVD And Workshops With Fstoppers.com

Over the past few months, I've been scheming with Lee Morris and Patrick Hall of fstoppers.com to bring our combined talents together and produce a DVD/tutorial series on the subject of architectural photography. So in May and June of this year, I once again left Los Angeles and headed to Charleston, SC to begin production on the largest project I've been involved in to date. Working with local advertising agencies, we set up a series of shoots for varying clients all over the Charleston area and we were lucky enough to get them to allow us to film everything that went on. 

This is, for the most part, an entirely comprehensive tutorial. While it would be pretty impossible to teach EVERY single method of architectural photography, we did our best to cover the basics all the way through the more advanced techniques. We've got a chapter on shooting real estate and getting things right in the camera, for those who are just starting out with minimal gear. We've got a chapter shooting a home for one of Charleston's most well-known architects, where we dive into topics such as using natural light, staging a room, using scrims and subtractive lighting, light painting, and photoshop techniques to bring it all together. We've got a chapter dealing with commercial photography for restaurant interiors, as well as creating moody light painted scenes and controlling light from multiple sources to ensure that you can create a repeatable result in pretty much any situation that could ever arise. We got to shoot at some of Charleston's (and the country's) best restaurants - such as Husk, which has been voted the best new restaurant in America and has featured on many TV segments in the past few years. Very, very exciting stuff! 

Each image in the tutorial was designed to teach a technique, so keep that in mind while viewing. We wanted to show you a myriad of options for creating your own awesome architectural images, so we really pulled out all the stops and went to down wherever possible. Even if we didn't need to do it for a certain image, we included the technique anyway, just to give you as many options as possible for soliving problems that you'll face on any given architectural or interior shoot.

And here's the most exciting part of all of this. We've decided to release one of the shots - a dusk light painted exterior - with the DVD. That means you'll get the PSD files and you'll be able to follow right along as I edit the file in the tutorial. You'll be able to create an image exactly as I am, folllowing my every move - learning my techniques exactly in the method that I use them. No stone will be left unturned, as I wanted this to be an entirely comprehensive tutorial. 

Above, I've included a few of the images that we're going to walk you through step-by-step. All told, we shot over 20 images and it looks like at least fifteen of them are going to make it into the final cut. Each of them teaches a different technique - from light painting, to dealing with tricky color casts, to adding artificial light through windows, fixing pesky window views and ensuring that you can see whatever you want to see out a window, balancing light at different times of day, and so on and so forth. I'm really, really excited about this project, and I can't wait to see it released. 

As of right now, we're planning for a fall 2013 release; definitely before the new year. Keep your eyes peeled for more details, which I'll release as we get closer to completion. We've also got a number of promotional videos in the works that I'll post and share, as well!

More to come...looking forward to it all! 

Mpkelley.com: Behind The Scenes Of a Luxury Interior Photo Shoot

I was recently invited by the team at Fstoppers.com to dissect one of my interior photographs for an article. I've been a long time reader and contributer, but it wasn't until recently that I had full reign to go into detail with regards to the construction and completion of one of my shoots. You'll be able to see some of the challenges faced when shooting interiors and archtiecture, and hopefully it gives a better understanding of what my thought process is during a shoot. Click on the photo below or head here to read the article.