What makes an AV system photo great?

Let’s start by defining the qualities of an effective AV system photo.

1. It captures the feel of the room, enhancing the existing lighting but not overwhelming it.

Most architectural photographers spend a lot of time lighting a given room. The reason they do this is that the eye is less sensitive to changes in light intensity than film or a digital sensor. What looks good in person will often look contrasty and harsh to a camera. So the theory is to light the room so that it looks as good, or better, on film than it does to the eye.

I have to tell you, it’s very difficult to get a natural-looking result this way, and all but the best practitioners end up with something that looks pretty artificial. Then too, the architect or interior designer has spent a lot more time designing the installed lighting than any photographer will spend redoing it.

One of my friends takes a softer approach with his architectural photography, simply supplementing the room’s lights with strobes to brighten up the shadows. The trick to this method is managing the color values of the various types of light involved. But there are ways to do that.

The third approach is to shoot the room at various exposures with the existing lighting, then combine the results in a multi-layered PhotoShop file. I'll explain how to use this method in detail later for those who would like to try it.

2. It shows the AV to is best advantage.

It always annoys me to see a conference room photo with a washed-out, blue-tinted projected image or an overexposed TV or plasma monitor. That’s not the way those screens look if you’re standing in the room. If it was, there would be a lot fewer systems sold.

The reason these images look that way in photos is that the brightness and the color temperature of the screen is almost never the same as the rest of the room and requires different settings on the camera. Thus, with rare exceptions, the photographer needs to take a separate exposure for any screen image in the room, then combine the results later in the computer.

Of course, it's possible today to fake a screen image in PhotoShop. That's often necessary, but it's not the best solution. Projectors and monitors simply can't produce images as clean and variation-free as the computer. For this reason, simulated images rarely look real.

3. It's eyecatching and dramatic.

One thing that architectural photographers do very well is bring out the drama of a given room. To do so, they use perspective to its best advantage, often straightening out the converging lines that occur naturally but are much more noticeable in a photograph than to the eye.

It used to take a view camera, with its ability to tilt the lens and film back independently, to control this problem, but now anyone can do it in PhotoShop. PhotoShop plug-ins can also control barrel distortion, an unnatural curvature of objects due to the use of wide-angle lenses.

Used together, these software tools can help greatly both in producing dramatic views of meeting rooms and in making straightforward views more effective.

If you plan to hire a photographer to shoot your latest system work, make sure he understands that you expect dramatic, eye-catching images that highlight the look and lighting of the actual room and show the AV system to its best advantage.

If you plan to take the photos in-house, keep reading for my explanation of how to do it.

Next: shooting your own AV system photos