Photographers Guildelines

Setups

We typically use 12 to 20 photos of a home in every story. We prefer to have a few more to give us some choice. We look for:

s An outdoor shot of the house and its grounds.
s Several wide shots of rooms giving a good 'feel' of the home.
s If possible, show the flow from one room to another (for example, an open doorway reveals the adjacent room).
s Several shots of vignettes, that is, the homeowners' arrangements of furniture and decoration (for example, two chairs and a table as opposed to the entire room),
s Closeups of interesting or significant antiques and architectural details such a moldings, door hardware, or construction.
s Although we don't often use them, we would like a portrait of the home owners in their home environment.
s If the home has under gone extensive or recent restoration, we like 'before' pictures, which the homeowner may be able to supply (we can work with any format and will return paper photographs).

Style Considerations

If you are working as your own photo stylist, here are some styling ideas to keep in mind:

s We prefer fireplaces lighted. A long exposure benefits the flame.
s When the windows are bright, candles should not be lighted. Our ancestors never wasted a candle when they could see in daylight.
s Watch for reflections from your strobes. They nastily appear in windows, mirrors, and glass-covered wall hangings. Move your lights to eliminate them.
s Watch for your own reflection in mirrors and dark windows.
s Hide electrical cords when possible.
s Although getting a thermostat or outlet in a photo is often inevitable, don't make it the center of attention in the photo.
s Attempt to remove artifacts of the 20th and 21st Centuries such as family photos, radios, telephones, mixers, and so on, from pictures.
s Often adding flower arrangements or food (always appropriate to the period the home represents) adds life to an otherwise lifeless photo.

Lighting

Lighting is an art every photographer must learn. We use photos taken with both natural and artificial lighting. Most use a combination.

Indoor natural light images require a tripod. You cannot hold a camera still enough for good depth of field and a well-lit image.

Artificial lighting requires strobes. Hot lights--even high-powered video lights--just don't cut it. We know. We've tried.

On-camera flash units are not acceptable. They yield very flat lighting and harsh shadows. You don't always get light where you need it. And they rarely have enough power (or good enough coverage) to do justice to an entire room.

Consquently we use a sturdy studio strobe unit (2400 watt-seconds) because, well, it's really sturdy. And its heavy and a bear to carry. We hate taking it with us, but we love the results.

Windows are always a challenge. The first question is whether you want to see what's outside. When we shoot a Christmas scene in July, we often let windows burn in so you can't see what's outside. We find that you should cover the window if you shoot available light because although the window will nicely burn-in with a long shutter speed, reflections from green leaves and grass outside will highlight everything around the window with a give-away green glow. We hold a white 4 x 6-foot Photoflex translucent reflector over windows we want to burn-in to eliminate the green.

We'd rather see outside through the windows when we can. Getting a balance between flash indoors and natural light outside means adjusting your camera's aperture (f-stop) for a proper exposure from your strobe, then slowing the shutter speed to balance the outside light. With 1200-watt-seconds of strobe through a couple diffusers, we often shoot at f/11 and 1/30th second at ISO 100. (At least that's a good place to start.)

We use various diffusers to soften shadows. We prefer a large softbox (36 by 48 or bigger) when there's room, umbrellas when we're moving fast. But we get our best results by using natural light as fill. We throttle back the strobes and let the shutter speed stretch out for a second or more. Available light fills and softens the shadows while the strobe adds sparkle and uniformity. (You really need a long exposure to make a candle look right--and we shoot a lot of candles in Early American Life).

Image Size and Resolution

Every digital camera has its own 'raw' image format. We do not have the necessary software for working with all possible 'raw' images, so please do not submit photos in your cameras 'raw' format (if it offers one).

Most digital cameras also save JPEG images as files with the extension '.jpg'. We can work with these images exactly as they come from your camera.

Many professional photographers have more pride in their work after they've made some corrections in Photoshop. If you must, keep these factors in mind:

Our printer has strict requirements as to image resolution. Images must be at a resolution of 300 dots per inch, so we would prefer images set at that resolution. In that most digital camera package images at 72 dpi as the default, most photographers adjust the size and resolution of their images. We prefer to see the pixels as your camera made them. In other words, convert your images to 300 dpi but do not resample them to make a photo of any given size. In Photoshop, that means that you should never check the 'Resample image' box when adjusting image size (at least when you plan to send digital photos to us).

Color

When our images are reproduced in print, they are in the CMYK colorspace. The printing process uses four inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black--hence CMYK) to make a printed color image. Most digital cameras and personal computers work with RGB images made by combining red, green, and blue signals. At some point, your images must be converted from RGB to CMYK colorspace to be printed. Hold that thought until you get to 'File Format,' below.

Color images are also defined by bit-depth. Most people think that a 48-bit bit-depth is higher quality than 24. For us, that's irrelevant because our printer requires 32-bit CMYK images. Consequently we want your images at 8-bits-per-channel, not 16-bits-per-channel. The higher quality just doesn't make the transition to print (but it does make files twice the size). Make sure your images have a bit-depth of 8-bits-per-channel.

Gamma

Scientifically, gamma is the ratio between input and output contrast. Even if you don't know what that means, be aware that gamma is very important to previewing and printing images. Previewing systems with different gammas yield on-screen images with different tonal qualities. This problem is compounded by the fact that PCs and Macs use different gammas in their monitor systems. What you see on your monitor is likely not what we see on ours when viewing your images.

We pass all of our images through a single computer-and-monitor system (and a single pair of eyes) to insure consistency of what appears in print. We often end up raising the gamma of images to overcome the inevitable blocking of black in th print images. We have found we have more to work with if you let your digital camera do the work and not modify image contrast before you send us your images. We often undo the work you've done just so the images will come out of the high-speed lithographic offset presses looking something like reality.

Image Geometry

Photography's translation of the three dimensions of reality to the two of a flat picture results in image distortion. The walls of tall buildings, for example, seem to collapse as you look toward the top. The effect becomes more pronounced as you use wider angle lenses.

As a home or shelter magazine, Early American Life looks for good architectural photography. That is, all the vertical lines of an image should be parallel to the edges of the photograph. The lines of a tall building will not converge as you look up.

Old time photographers--those who cut their teeth on bellows-type view cameras--know there is a simple rule to keeping everything straight. Keep your camera level. We use a tripod with a geared head with bubble levels to help insure the camera is level and verticals are vertical.

This advice does not change in the digital age of limited camera movements. You have to be prepared to have half the image cropped off to keep upr verticals straight. Don't worry. When we see a nicely shot house on half a frame with the rest filled with grass, we know why you did it that way. And we appreciate it.

Of course, Photoshop gives you a couple of ways to fix converging verticals. Under the Distort selection of the Filter menu, you can choose Lens Correction. You can also select Transform from the Edit menu, then Distort. Either way, you can adjust the image geometry to straighten things up. We do it all the time. However, severe distortion inevitably means losing much of the image. So if you can't shoot level, you must shoot wide so you (or we) have room to compensate in Photoshop.

One other geometric issue: even the best of today's wide-angle zooms exhibit barrel or pincushion distortion, which makes straight lines appear curved, which is particularly ugly near the edge of an image. Photoshop lets you correct barrel distortion in the Lens Correction filter.

File Format

Our printer wants us to send them uncompressed TIF (tagged image format) images not JPEG images. That's great, but most PCs are reluctant to display CMYK .tifs. Moreover a full-page CMYK .tif takes over 40MB of disk space and therefore loads slowly. Consequently, we store all images twice, as a uncompressed CMYK .tif for final layout and as a RGB .jpg file for previewing (both are high resolution). You can make our lives easier by submitting your images in both formats, .tifs using CMYK colorspace in a directory called 'tif' and .jpgs with RGB colorspace in a directory called 'jpg'.