Why I do what I do...

With the economy in general, and the building industry specifically, these days it's always nice to get a gig shooting nice design. This was the case last month when we were able to photograph the new lobby of the Denver law office of Jacobs Chase for Sarah Hornfeck of Ronan Design Group. (Sarah is designing her website at the moment, so if you just get a landing page, check back later.) Sarah is one of those designers who is capable of working with any client, and able to compliment any design. This was our third shoot with Sarah, and we have one more to schedule later this summer. I'll upload that one when we shoot it. It will be worth checking back. It will be of an historic preservation in a great old building in downtown Denver.

Jacobs Chase wanted to update their lobby and conference rooms, and have the option of combining all the spaces together to be able to host parties without having to go into different rooms. As usual, there were fire code and other permit issues to deal with. Given the obstacles, (or even without taking the obstacle into account) I think Sarah did a bang up job. Better yet, the client thought so too.

Okay, this isn't Sarah's blog it's mine, so I'm going to brag about the photography now. Shooting great design is always a blast. The key here was to show the space in each of its possible configurations. We started with shooting the doors closed. We wanted the lighting of each shot to look as close to the others as possible. So, having the doors closed was the obvious starting point:



Then we moved to having the glass doors open, but the movable wall still separating the two conferences rooms:



And finally to the third shot, showing the fully open area:



Choosing the lower camera angle helped accentuate the intimacy of the seating area, and the overall expanse of the space once everything was fully open.

Architectural photographers must be able to not only show the spaces for their clients, they must be able to show the relationship between the spaces, and the overall feel the designer was going for. I think we accomplished that for Sarah.

Our style of photography is one of subtle lighting. We don't like to have the lighting drive the photograph. That's the job of the design. Some shooters (& some clients) really like to light the feeling right out of a room. We don't. We still light, but not in a distracting manner. Our joke is we use "available lighting". Which translates into using every available light in our cases. I know we're done lighting when I'm out of lights to light with.

For more examples of work we do, please visit our site at Moss Photography.

Thanks for reading!

~V~