Food & Interior Photography in a French farmhouse villa

So I am currently in the south of France in Provence, and we are staying at a gorgeous farmhouse. It's huge It's like a villa multi rooms and the owners have asked us to do some interior photography in order to Update their listings on Airbnb and booking.com So I'm going to do some interior photography And I'm going to show you some really cool tricks that you can use in order to spice up your own interior photography So the first scene that I'm shooting is this breakfast table And what's making this shot actually really difficult is the fact that the Sun is being filtered through a big tree that's above us and it's creating this watchy light and This is the only opportunity we have to set up this table for this shot So we just have to live with the light And it means that I really have to watch the dynamic range and make sure that there won't be any blown-out highlights on the actual Table, but I know that I'll be able to recover the dark areas in post without any problem. I'm shooting this scene handheld It's so bright out here. I don't need the tripod and Even though I have a very wide-angle lens. This is actually a 14 to 24 I'm not worrying about keeping the camera level at this point Which I will address once I get inside and tell you why it needs to be level All right so now we're inside the kitchen and There are a couple of things that I've done to make sure that these interior shots look as good as they can be So number one, although you don't need to use a tripod I am using the tripod because for these really set up shots where there's food involved and table settings Every little movement of the camera makes a big difference when you're using a wide-angle lens and it's just so much easier to find the Perfect composition when your camera is on a tripod and I mentioned wide-angle lens It goes without saying you really need a wide-angle lens for these type of shots so that you can make the room look very large Especially when you're shooting Bedrooms bedrooms are really important to be using a wide-angle lens with otherwise You're getting this narrow little focus on the room and when you're talking about a real estate Listing type of photo or like a hotel advertisement type of photo You want the room to look big and bright and airy and for that reason you need wide-angle But point number three because you are using wide-angle It's super critical to ensure that your camera is dead level and I'm talking about on a vertical plane like this this is a trick that I learned from Serge Ramelli, and it's very important because when your camera is Using a wide-angle lens and then you tilt up just a bit Well any straight lines like the corners of a wall they go from being vertical to like this or like that But if your camera is completely horizontal dead level then any vertical line will remain vertical and for that reason you need to Use the tripod and ensure that your camera is level now this means that it's important that you pay close attention to how high your tripod is and That's why I've got the camera quite low here because I can't tilt down so The workaround for not being able to tilt down is to lower the camera down on the tripod The other thing I'm doing is I've bumped up the ISO a little bit. It's 400 and I've got f8 as my aperture, so I've got some good depth of field and if I do have some blown-out highlights That's okay because we're talking about man-made light inside this kitchen, and I want it to look airy and bright and If I have some blown-up highlights where the lights are that's fine with me because it will give it that magazine cover type of a look so here's the very first setup and You can see that the wide-angle lens is really close to the table It's like two feet away, and I've set up some interesting foreground elements It it's so similar in a way to landscape photography where you want to tell a story through your photo and have some really interesting Foreground elements, so I put the plate of fruit right here I put the fruit juice beside it the bread right behind and this is going to be the foreground of the photo It tells the story that this is a breakfast table and in the background is the rest of the kitchen and I think it's really important to take extra time put your camera into live view and Take a really good hard look at what the foreground is going to be and if there kind of is a focal point almost like The main subject of the photo which will be the foreground here, and I'm liking what I'm seeing I think this will turn out to be a really beautiful looking shot And the one thing that I'm always doing no matter if it's interior photography or exterior photography landscape check the histogram Just to make sure there aren't any mistakes that you'll discover when you get home, and then it's too late to fix them beautiful histogram here so I'm going to take the camera off the tripod and Turn up the ISO so that my shutter speed is nice and fast and then walk around and take some detailed shots all around the room That looks super nice, I like it so I've got some blown-out highlights because I'm taking this picture in the direction of the window and If you look at the histogram you can see that it's definitely hitting the right-hand side, but that's okay I'm not trying to make this look like a blue hour photo shoot I want again repeating myself But I want that bright airy type of look and that's what you get when you have some blown-out highlights coming in from the window So we just switched directions so that the camera is going to take a couple shots looking down the opposite end of the table and There was some empty table area right here I know it really doesn't look much on video, but to a wide-angle lens that's two and a half feet away from the table This is a big piece of real estate, so this is the foreground for the image so once again I put the fruit tray here and The breads and buns and that makes a foreground element and then for the background we have that huge fireplace Which is a nice big anchoring focal point in the room and This might be a better composition than the first ones that I took so we'll see how this goes I've got my ISO back to a low number I'm down at 400 and I'm at f8 to give me the depth of field and because I'm back on the tripod I can take a nice slow shutter speed of 1 15th of a second and Here we go and check out the photo So one of the things that's super important for these interior design photo shoots is to make sure that every single light in the room is Turned on if there's a light and it has a plug and it has a switch go find it and turn it on it just makes The photos look so much better because dark rooms don't sell on real estate or booking type of websites All right, so we've got a lot of wide-angle shots so now it's time to put on more of a zoom lens This is a 24 to 70 so that we can get sort of individual little close-ups of specific elements that are on the table or on the counter and That will make more of an interesting overall collage for this project So we shot various angles of the kitchen table and I did some shots that were really wide angle and then I zoomed in a little bit so that there's that combination of the big picture and Also the small picture the little fine details that make a photo series interesting and same thing goes with the entire room I want to take some shots that show the entire room Where you just see everything at once and then other shots where it's a detail kind of shot like this little Ensemble that's right here on the counter It's great to have one photo that just shows all that so that the customer has a real variety of photos to choose from so the kitchen is now done and I Shot a few of the bedrooms and some of the bathrooms and now we are in a sitting area at the top of the main Central staircase and I'm going to compose this shot so that the windows are kind of symmetrical in the photo So that they're not off to one side. It gives a sense of balance for the photo So this will be a great little shot right here. It's definitely going to have blown out highlights out the window So if you like these kind of videos I'd really appreciate it If you would hit the subscribe button and the little bell beside it that way you'll be notified whenever I have a new video and it would also help me out a lot if you would Like the video and leave a comment and that way YouTube knows that this is interesting content. Okay back to the photography So I've got all the photos taken and I want to show you three very simple tricks that I use in Lightroom That will help you transform your interior design photos and take them from being average to being wow Those look awesome. And the tricks are really simple. The first one is using the transform tool and for especially for smaller rooms, I see that it makes a big difference and I click on the little button here that says vertical and That way any of the vertical lines like window frames door frames or the corner of a wall They will then become truly vertical. It makes a very big difference. You don't want that wide-angle weird look that looks like a sort of a fisheye lens the other really big difference is Involving the brush tool and I'll save the best one for last But what I do with the brush tool when you click on the brush tool I will paint over areas of fabric that have wrinkles in them such as the back of this sofa or the edge of a bed mattress or maybe a bedspread a duvet and Then I will select the negative clarity slider and back it right down to zero and that way it takes away any Emphasis on those wrinkles and we don't want to see them But the number one biggest thing that you can do that will make a huge difference in your interior design Photography is to use the brush tool and boost the exposure on separate little areas of the photo So, for example, I did it on the back the top of this sofa right here at the top of that chair The bright area on the floor and the bright area on the floor. So let's take a look at what it looks like without that here is the before and the after the before and the after makes a huge difference it just Accentuates the highlights and it turns the photo like this into kind of interior design magazine cover material So this place where we're staying it's called close st. Esteve. It's located between the town of Avignon and il sur le sorgue It's right in the middle of the best places in the south of France to visit and photograph It's an hour and a half away from Valensole and the lavender fields If you are ever looking for a place to stay in the south of France consider staying at close st Esteve you will love it here. It is like a palace. The building is 300 years old It used to be a vineyard. They used to make wine here and there are olive trees lavender rose So I hope you like this and I will see you in my next video and maybe I'll be back home in Canada by then Take care. Bye. Bye