How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?

This is one of the images from the Gold's Gym photo shoot I did yesterday
for Sustainable Flooring, the provider of the wood flooring for the gym.

Yesterday I spent an hour photographing three interior rooms of the Gold's Gym in Cedar Park, Texas. Sustainable Flooring, the company that had installed the wood flooring in those rooms, needed some photographs showing off their work. The photograph above is of the basketball court, but they also installed the wood flooring in the step class room (Group X) and the yoga room (Mind and Body Studio).


There are several things to consider when doing interior photography. First, you must use a good sturdy tripod. Typically, interior shots are low-light situations and using a tripod with a slow shutter speed will give you proper exposure. You could use strobes or other artificial light, but that may cause your image to look unnatural and most of the time using available light makes for a better picture anyway. Of course, if you have a highly light sensitive camera like the Nikon D3, then you may not need to worry about this at all. But for most of the rest of us, this is the key factor in getting good interior shots. Second, use an aperture that will allow you to get a decent depth of field. For marketing photos like this, it is important to show off the product and having the image turn blurry quickly is not optimal. I actually shot a series of apertures and picked the best one of the bunch. I started at f8 and went to f22, taking a photograph at each aperture in between. Finally, think of an angle that gives the viewer the best view of what you are trying to show off while still showing enough of the rest of the image to show context. In this case, I wanted to feature the flooring, but also keep enough of the rest of the room in the image so the viewer could still make out what kind of room it was. Overall, the client was happy with the 15 images I delivered and they are currently using them in marketing materials.