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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!

 

Architectural Photography In Iceland: Michael Kelley Featured On Strobist.com

Strobist.com, which is one of the world's leading photographic resources, recently featured a piece on my 'Living: Island Style' project, in which I set out to photograph the architecure of Iceland during a three-week whirlwind trip around the country. The article discusses my motivation, how I pulled it all off, and how it might inspire other photographers to undertake a personal project of their own to further their career and kickstart their creative growth. I'm really happy with the way David Hobby, the author, wrote the piece, and I have received numerous emails thanking me for inspiring them with my trip. When I left Los Angeles, nobody really had any idea what I was talking about when I told them I was going to photograph architecture on a remote island in the North Atlantic. "You're going where? To do what? Why?" was the most common response. Check out the article, I'd love to know what you think, and I hope you are inspired to take on a project of your own after reading it. If you ended up here from Strobist, thanks so much for visiting, and I hope you enjoy the work on my site.

Keep an eye out for the finished 'Living: Island Style' project, which is slated to be finished by the end of the year.

To read the article on Strobist, click here.