Inside and Out

There is a knack to show-home photography. You’re dealing with a house that has been styled with high end furnishings and accessories for viewings rather than photographic opportunities. There are always things to remove, and the exteriors are always adorned with marketing banners. The garage is inevitably a marketing office fitted with glass doors rather than garage doors, and the temperature inside them is never less than several thousand degrees. When shooting them for estate agents, the images will be unscrupulously used by the builders themselves – saving hundreds or thousands of pounds at your expense, and in order to keep working you have to shut up and put up with it. Copyright is a dirty word to every single company involved in marketing property, and I have images out there that have been stolen by estate agents and unashamedly credited to themselves (with a copyright notice helping themselves to the glory!) in order to sell multi-million pound properties. Unbelievable.

Those of you who read this rant every so often (all 3 of you), will know that I love using the 24mm tilt/shift lens for architecture and interiors. It’s a specialist lens that demands some in-depth knowledge of certain techniques, and when used correctly it can help produce beautifully composed images. Unfortunately it got clonked in my case one day, and the revolving mount at the back which allows you to switch between landscape and portrait oriented functionality got jammed. This meant that it had to head down to my usual repair dudes in London known as Fixation. The repair was simple, but properly expensive – coming in just short of £300 with the return courier fees and whatever. It had to be done. While it was away, I knew that I had a couple of special jobs – the first involving shooting for a Cussins Homes new development, and a residential property on one of the most prestigious streets in Newcastle – The Grove in Gosforth. I really needed my lens, and considered hiring a r