Architectural lighting shoot at Devon station

Here are a few shots from a job at Crediton Station in Devon commissioned by the lighting manufacturer DW Windsor. The job entailed photographing 3 of their products the Garda illuminated handrail, Kova fitted to the buildings and Kirium Pro illuminating the platform.

Crediton Station, Devon - lighting photography

I do quite a bit of architectural lighting photography and enjoy the challenges it offers over normal architectural photography. I thought it would be useful to look at this job and highlight a couple of the key things  to think about if you are new to lighting photography.  The main issues discussed here are the very short working window and the need to control glare from the lighting.

To get good lighting shots you need it to be dark enough to see the full effect of the lighting but still retain plenty of light in the sky. People often talk about the golden hour when photographing landscapes but if you are dealing with artificial lighting this window of good lighting is much shorter.  In that golden hour of landscape photography you can gradually adjust your settings to get a good exposure as the lighting levels fall. The problem with lighting photography is that the light output of the fittings is generally fixed and there will be a specific exposure value that shows off the lighting at its best. As you are working to this fixed value you have to wait until the ambient lighting matches your ideal exposure value. If you shoot too early the ambient light will be too high and you won't see the effect of the lighting. If you shoot too late the ambient levels will be low and give you black uninteresting skies. In reality this gives you about 20 - 25mins to get the job done and about 10mins to get your best shots. Ideally you can start off shooting to the east where the sky will be slightly darker and then switch to shooting west as it gets darker. 

Kova by DW Windsor, sky just dark enough for lighting shots - lighting photography

As there is so little time I always arrive in day light and spend a couple of hours planning my shots, marking shooting positions with chalk marks and making notes of likely settings. Just to add to the complications on a job like this one in Crediton it is always nice to get a couple of trains in the shots. At busy station that's not a problem but a Crediton there are only 2 trains per hour and they both arrived at the same time. That meant  there was only one chance to get the shot I wanted with the optimum light levels. It's always nice to capture trains with some motion blur and in this case a shutter speed of 1/3s was needed. I’d tried this out on a few trains during the day to make sure I could get the look I wanted. You may need to raise you ISO settings and/or use a larger aperture than you would like to get such a "fast" shutter speed as it's getting dark.   

Kirium Pro by DW Windsor, sky at optimum brightness for lighting photography facing east - lighting photography

Garda illuminated handrail by DW Windsor, sky at optimum brightness facing west - lighting photography

Another consideration when planning your shots is glare from the lighting. When shooting for the lighting industry you need to minimise glare in the shots. Stray uncontrolled lighting, star burst and halos will all detract from a good lighting shot.

Typical examples of glare in lighting shots

If you look at this example above the glare at A is caused by being within the light distribution pattern of the fitting and having a direct view of the lamp. When planning your shots during the day if you can see the lamp in the fitting you are likely to get this sort of shot later on. The best way of avoiding this is to compose your shots so that you don't have to look directly into any fittings. If you still get some glare on the edges of the frame you can normally control this by using a bit of card to stop the stray light. The starbursts seen at  B can be reduced by using larger apertures. There is a tendency with architectural shots to stop down the aperture to give plenty of depth of field but these small apertures give larger and more spiky stars. The kind of halo seen at C is normally caused by condensation on the surface of the lens. Try and avoid breathing on you lenses and keep the lens cap on as much as possible to avoid this.