Shooting Home Interiors with Mirrorless Cameras

From The Best of Mark Toal

Using a mirrorless camera, I photographed a small house in Portland, Oregon for my friend and designer Shannon Baird for publication on the Dwell Magazine website. If you are not familiar with the small house movement just Google “small house” or check out this article in Southern Living Magazine.

After the photos were published on Dwell’s website I received a few questions about how I shot the images. One in particular asked how I was able to keep everything in focus and get a fairly balanced exposure between the interior and bright windows.

When I first started shooting Micro Four-thirds cameras, I discovered that I get a lot more depth of field than cameras with larger sensors. When you combine a wide-angle lens like Panasonic ‘s Lumix 7-14mm f/4 lens with the smaller sensor you get almost infinite depth-of-field as you can see in the photos.

In order to match the interior lighting with the outdoors I slightly underexposed the images so that I would retain some detail in the windows that I would (later) recover using Adobe Lightroom. This is where the highlight slider in Lightroom has saved me so many times. I just move it to the left to recover the bright outdoors and adjust the exposure to make the interior look right.