Kris D'Amico Photography

August 4th, 2009 by Kris

One of the greatest assets to photography is, it’s not real.

Let me qualify that statement, not everything that shows up in front of the camera is real, or better yet the stuff that we leave out of the frame maybe more important than the stuff we put in the frame!! That makes me think of that quote from Hemingway, “It’s not what you write that’s important; It’s what you leave out.” Off on a tangent there, sorry, let’s talk about making a little space feel big!

Take a look at this image first.

This is the control panel of my buddy Chris Havens of The Sound Haven.

This images does the simple task of making the space feel clean and, well, spacious. Let’s talk about the techniques here! I did three things here to help make the space feel larger:

1. a wide angle lens
2. directional shadows
3. negative space

So, let’s break these down. Number One, a wide angle lens. Pretty self explanatory, you want to capture all you can capture and often times you don’t have time to backup all the way, right?  I shoot with a 24-105 lens, if I had a prime 24 (Canon make this amazing little EF 24mm f/1.4 L II USM, but @ $1700, will you know) we would have reduce almost all of the slight pincushion in this picture, but for practical purposes – I think this works just fine.

Second, I set up a beauty dish about 50° from center of the “Control Station” and turned it up a stop brighter than my fill light, which was a 4 foot umbrella. This does two things for us, one it creates a directional light that’s not comming from the camera and it’s casting some decent shadows. The shadows will trick the eye into the illusion of depth. That’s about it, it’s the mystery of the dark . . . ok, maybe not.

Moving right along, negative space. This is the single most important tool that a photographer can use to make a room feel spacious. We have two areas of negative space here, each one acoplishes different things. The first is the area of the carpet infront of the desk, all this does it give the illustion that we’ve go all this space to back up to get the shot! The second area is the space on the back wall, the paint color on that wall is darker, so it gives the illusion of depth.

Well that’s all I’ve got to say about this one. Your turn! Go shoot some small spaces and make them feel huge!!

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So, I just got an email asking me to post a few other shots from the shoot. Here are a few of my favorites, one of two of these very well might find it’s way into the portfolio!