Delve into the world of interior photography and discover how to adjust lenses to achieve the ideal field of view. Learn about the impact of focal length and how it correlates to the human eyesight, and the importance of considering distortion when using wider lenses.
Key Insights
- Focal length, equivalent to the field of view in photography, can be adjusted according to the space being captured. For instance, a 50 millimeter camera lens roughly equates to human eyesight, making it an excellent portrait lens. However, interior photography often requires a wider angle lens to capture more detail in tighter spaces, typically a 16 by 24 type lens.
- Despite the appeal of a wider lens, it's crucial to remember that the wider the lens, the more distorted the image. For interior shots, a 16 millimeter range is advised, with a slight increase to 20 millimeters for larger spaces or exterior views. Variations can be made depending on the scene and desired result.
- Other important considerations when setting up a shot include sharpness, vignetting (shadow effects), and parallelism, particularly for ensuring vertical lines in eye-level shots. Composition overlays can also assist in adhering to the rule of thirds, providing a balanced and focused frame.
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The next thing that we want to look at is lens and this is where our first category is focal length. So focal length is the same as field of view and so we can adjust the field of view slash focal length based off of the space. So our eyes see at 50 millimeters roughly, like a 50 millimeter camera lens.
If you don't, if you know anything about cameras, you know that 50 is a good kind of portrait lens because it lends itself nicely to our natural eyesight. However, if you were to do some interior photography, you may realize that you may want a wide angle lens to capture a wider range of view, especially in tighter spaces. So typically you'll see like a 16 × 24 type lens, you know like that's going to be like kind of your good wide angle lens.
And so that'll be able to capture more of the interior, but we want to be careful as the wider you get, the more distorted that image will become, right? So I like to stick kind of in this 16 millimeter kind of range for these types of interior shots. If I'm in a lot more of a kind of like a larger space, I might bump that up to 20. And same with that kind of the exterior, right? But since I'm inside here, I want to go into 16, maybe even 15, depending on how much of this I want to get.
But for me, I feel like 16 is that kind of sweet spot. Then as we open up some of these details, we can see that there's vignetting. This kind of gives this shadow effect on the exterior of the image.
And this is a common thing that happens with photographs. So I don't like a ton of that because I can add it in post. So I'll stick it at 35 percent.
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And then sharpness, this is the sharpness of the image where you go really up, you get really crisp lines and details in zero, where it's just kind of everything's kind of very soft. I do like a little bit of sharpness, so I'll add that to kind of 15. And that really depends on the style that you want to go with.
I will not check chromatic aberration. It's not something we really need to use. And then here is parallelism.
I talked about this earlier. This is what I want to check because I want to make sure that all of my lines are vertical. This is extremely important for all eye level shots.
Any sort of aerial shots, we can uncheck that because we're OK with having it be more of a 3D view, not this 2D axonometric kind of view. And then near clipping, you know, this is where I can even bring this all the way down to 0.01. This is just showing you like how far away, how far on the edge where it will be clipping this off. And then as we go down here, there's depth of field options, there's film back, there's bloom and flares, and then there's composition overlays.
I'm going to skip these three and I'll come back to those in a minute. But composition overlays, this is where we can see more of our composition layouts. When we select grid, you will see that we get this kind of nine rectangle box.
You know, this lends itself to the rule of thirds, which is a classic kind of composition trick where you want to put your focus kind of in the middle area, or you want to make sure that you have even distribution of where your focus is at in here. Like for me, when I see this image, I'm going to have a focus on someone sitting right here, someone sitting right here, kind of enjoying the space. This is where my eye is going to go for my focus, right? If I was to move my camera to be over here, my focus now is going to be kind of in this area.
We want to think about kind of our, as we start framing our image, where our focus of interest is going to be. We also want to look at our height. You know, it's kind of hard to tell how high we are in the space.
You know, we hold down our center wheel and drag it, we can see that we're going up high, but we don't know how high we're going. We typically either want to be like, you know, sitting in the chair or standing up looking down. So to, to do a quick check, we can actually just bring in a person just really quickly.
We'll just bring in a guy and we'll actually, we'll just move him right kind of here in front of the camera, even closer. So that way we're kind of right at his eye level, right? So this is kind of right where we want to be kind of eye level of his head. And then I can just turn this off.
Now that we're here, so now as I'm like looking down, you know, this is where I'm at. And now if I was to back up, you know, now I'm kind of at this eye level view. And so here I'm going to be like, you know, this may be a little bit too high.
Maybe we're down a little bit lower, but we want to make sure that we understand where that eye height is at. We're more accurate to the space. So something like this seems really well proportioned as got a good, good amount of stuff to the side, to the front, good amount of foreground, good amount of kind of the top portion of the ceiling.
And I can actually sync this and refresh this scene showing this. We want to use leading lines like the flooring patterns, beams or furniture edges to guide our eye towards a focal point. We want to pay attention to balance.
We want to distribute visual weight across the frame. So one side doesn't feel too heavy. And don't underestimate the power of negative space, right? So, you know, let's say I wanted to do a nice frame, kind of in just looking at this couch, something like this, where I'm, I'm seeing the couch, I'm seeing the chair, a nice kind of framing view, right? I want to make sure that I'm framing it in a way that, that, that lends itself to this centered along this, this couch, but then maybe something might be a little bit too messy.
Like I may, I may not want this, this chair here, or, or maybe the wide angle is making this chair feel very out of scale. So things like that, that we want to kind of make note of as we're doing it. And then we want to also kind of, I want to walk the camera around the space to, to see if we're like at the right angle that we want to get, or if there's a better situation.
Maybe if I moved it slightly over here, maybe I can get a little bit more of this kind of countertop. And then it's kind of see that maybe that's feeling a little bit better. So I can sync this.
Now that I set up these settings, the other thing that I want to look at is this depth of field. I'm going to go into this image here where I have this plant. And this is a good example of depth of field.
So what depth of field does is it gives you the option to enable objects that can be in your foreground to be blurred based off of where your focus is. And I can click this little focus right here. And let's say I want to focus on this plant.
Well, now this plant is in focus and the background is blurry, and that can be adjusted by our aperture. The lower the aperture, the more focus is going to be on the front and blurry in the background. If you want to get a little bit of kind of more of this crisp of this plant with this background being blurry, that's kind of what you want to look at.
Your focus shape is your kind of size of your kind of blurry fractals in the background. So that's kind of a good example. If you wanted to really spice up your design with some depth of field, that could be something pretty useful.
I'm going to not going to sync this. If I click this again, it'll go back to my default view. But then however, I can disable the depth of field for that.
Now that I have this scene set up with the right kind of image settings that I want with this 32 × 1800 and my camera settings, I want to make sure that I copied these type of settings over into the other views. So what I can do is I can find out where these views are at, go back to here, adjust this image to match that view slightly. And obviously we can make some adjustments within that.
I can click three on my keyboard and two to back up slowly to get to that right angle that I want. Something like this I think looks nice. And so I can actually do a duplicate of this and I can move this to the side and now I can kind of pan between the two to see where I was at between them.
I think maybe I want to do a bit more like this. You know maybe I'll back up a slightly bit more. Also you can think about maybe you don't want the light fixture within this space.
You can actually click the light and hide it and then you can sync it. Now I think now this is kind of that second view which is nice. Maybe I want to bring up my camera a little bit higher so maybe more standing over here.
Get enough of this corner and then kind of enough of the space. Now I can sync this. Now this is this was the previous image and this is our new one.
Very similar but this has the appropriate settings that we set up for camera and image. Then I can do the same thing for the kitchen. So this is the view that I want to match.
I will go into here and I will go to that specific area where I was just at. I'll try to mimic that same view. I want to keep this setting set up because I have that 16 millimeter focal length.
We kind of want to do something kind of right around kind of this type of angle and position. Enough of this chair. We're going to get some of that window back out a tad bit.
Just kind of right around right around here. I'll do a plus to duplicate this view with this new view and then I'm going to go reference this and that. We're very close to where we were at before.
Now I can delete these two. Delete and delete and now we have our three views that are saved. We can rename each of these by clicking the three dots and doing click rename and type in interior view one and then we can actually go here and we can do interior view two and then we'll do interior view three.
All right I want to save my file and in the next few videos we are going to start playing around with the environmental and render lighting settings. I'll see you in the next lesson.
