Getting the most out of digital cameras for images of AV systems

by Don Kreski

Probably the biggest factor in the success of the Lewis Sound website is the photography. “I love the pictures,” says Susan Lewis, CEO of Lewis Sound & Video Professionals. Lewis says she brought in Kreski Marketing to shoot these images because “we needed to substantiate that our work is professionally laid out, but also show enough that customers could recognize work that we had done for others in their industry, or in other schools or other churches.”

I approached the project knowing that Lewis had a large number of beautiful sites to photograph, but also knowing that architectural photographers’ rates - $1,000 or more per image - would be out of reach for the number of photos we wanted..

Instead, Lewis and I worked out the idea of a road trip, a packaged deal where I would visit multiple customers on a given day and shoot as many images as possible. The idea worked largely because of the way I work as a photographer.

The reason that traditional photographers charge what they do is that they spend an inordinate amount of time lighting each room artificially. I remember a photographer I once hired spent more than four hours setting up lights for a single boardroom shot. He lit almost every chair individually, plus the table, walls, carpet and so on. I thought at that time, there must be a better way.

My main problem with this technique is that, in most boardrooms, auditoriums, churches and even classrooms, an architect or interior designer has already spent many hours designing attractive lighting. The photographer’s challenge, in my mind, is to capture the lighting already in the room rather than to overpower it. That can be difficult because the architect is designing for the human eye, and the camera, whether film or digital, is much more sensitive to the contrast between bright and dim areas than the eye. So the photographer must find a way to even out the differences, so that the room looks natural in the final shot.

I worked with another photographer on several projects who would supplement a room’s lighting by applying strobes to those areas that were darker than what he wanted. He would actually do multiple exposures on a sheet of film, one exposure for each type of lighting, with the appropriate filter added to the camera as needed. As I came to understand what he did, I developed my own technique where I’d shoot multiple, but separate exposures for each shot, then combine them in PhotoShop to achieve the same result. For most images, this method eliminated the need for supplemental lighting.

This technique was perfect for the Lewis Sound project, as it allow me to work much more quickly than the traditional photographer, at least at the end user’s site. I worked out an agreement with Lewis where I would visit three to five customer sites each day for a set price, shooting quickly, but assembling the final images at a later time.

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There were downsides. We never knew for sure what kind of shape a room might be in when I got there, and I missed several shots because a room was tied up, or too messed up to photograph. We had to plan carefully to minimize driving time, though I certainly did spend a number of days trekking back and forth across Wisconsin. And of course I put at least as much time in back at the office, picking through and combining thousands of exposures in PhotoShop. But in the end I photographed more than 45 sites from 40 customers, as well as soliciting existing photos from 5 more. Currently we have 40 customer sites featured on the Lewis Sound website. These make a very impressive statement about the kind of work the firm does.

“One of the nice things about this project,” says Lewis, “was the fact that I could turn my list of customers over to Don, and I could trust him to not only get the shot but treat my customers well. The website wasn't going to happen if I had to do all the legwork and the calling myself. And I think also the customers were impressed that we hired a firm to go out and take pictures of their facilities.

“For example, Fay Schneider from Faith Lutheran in Appleton emailed me and said, ‘Susan, I was just on your website, and I want to tell you that I have never seen our church photographed so well.’ She was just tickled. These photos give us exactly what we wanted. We wanted to be able to show off our work and show off our customers at the same time.”

Visit the Lewis Sound website to view the images

Read a detailed explanation of Don’s photographic technique

View other photos by Kreski Marketing