Pro Techniques

When the space is fairly confined, Smith will instead use his Nikon SB-800 and SB-600 shoe-mount strobes, often, but not always, in TTL-Auto-Flash mode. In fact, they may provide the only lighting. Using an SB-800 with a blue gel over it and positioning it on the floor beneath the glass sink was a clever way to add a shock of color to the shot. An SB-600, bounced off the ceiling, provided fill.

Shoe-mount strobes came to the rescue in this tight spot. One, gelled blue, added some color to the sink from below, while a second, bounced off the ceiling, provided fill.	In this shot, we see how one shoe-mount strobe, triggered remotely and positioned at arm's length, could be used to focus attention on certain interior design elements, specifically a vintage bathtub fixture.

In another instance, only one SB-800 was needed to highlight a vintage bathtub fixture, with the light slightly diffused and aloft on a light stand. Here, however, Smith found it more expedient to set the flash to manual and trigger it remotely with a Wein SSR transmitter on the camera's hot shoe and a Wein receiver module on the flash itself. This is normally the path he takes when using studio strobes.

Another situation that made use of TTL flash revolved around the interior leading up into a widow's walk in a restored section of a house. The widow's walk is like a balcony, except that it affords a 360° view from atop the home, and usually out to sea. While also photographing the structure from the outside, Smith had to preserve the delicate balance between the blue sky visible through most of the windows and the interior itself. This confined space was certainly no place for a studio strobe, so he simply mounted an SB-800 onto the camera's hot shoe, allowing the flash to fill in the dark recesses.

In this situation, the shoe-mount was seated in the hot shoe, filling in the dark recesses in this structure.

A Different Perspective On Lenses
Shooting digitally, for Smith, also meant that he could now correct for distortion and perspective in Photoshop. That translated into one piece of glass he could do without: that cumbersome perspective-control lens. He replaced that with two lenses he finds far more versatile, from his perspective: a Sigma 10-20mm zoom and a Nikon 18-200mm VR, although other lenses may enter the picture as needed. He'll usually stop down to f/8 or f/11 to get the best image quality.

While some of his work is handheld, the camera usually finds its way to a Gitzo carbon-fiber tripod with a Manfrotto geared head for the precision this type of photography usually requires. Ball heads make it difficult to align the shot, he notes, whereas conventional three-way pan/tilt heads introduce a shift when the handles are tightened. "I don't experience that shift with this geared head. And that's important when shooting architecture." And to further guarantee that the image is properly aligned, he carries a small spirit level. But when he can't achieve reasonable alignment on both axes, he'll turn to Photoshop, first making whatever adjustments can be made during raw conversion. "I go to a line in the center of the image and make sure that's vertical. That is the most important first step." After raw conversion, he'll make any further corrections with Photoshop's Distort/Lens Correction filter (usually for distortion), although he prefers to correct for perspective by using the Crop tool and selecting the Perspective option.

Besides modifying his shooting and lighting techniques, Smith has adapted his workflow as well, enhancing efficiency all around. "These days I rarely even send out a FedEx package. I edit the pictures in Adobe Lightroom and CS3, upload them to an FTP site, and the client downloads them from there."