by Don Kreski

I'm not sure what Kari Mickits made of my suggestion that I shoot the Duchossois homes for AMX, but when Frank Weese, partner at Visitec Marketing, said he thought I would be right for the job, she hired me. Kari also asked if I could recommend a videographer to interview Dick and Craig Duchossois. The three of us met June 28 at Burnham Harbor in Chicago at the yacht Blue Moon, and then the next day at the Duchossois condo on Lake Shore Drive.

Shooting a luxury yacht and condo

Photographing an AV system in a residence is different than in a conference room mainly because of the amount of window light likely to be part of the shot. Other challenges are really very similar. The biggest issue, in my mind, is to allow the lighting already in the room to set the tone and feel of the photograph. Though architectural photographers often ignore the room lights and replace them with their own lighting, I believe this is a mistake. Generally speaking, an architect or interior designer has spent many hours designing a lighting system to best set off that room. It’s unlikely that a photographer will improve upon it. If he’s good, he may create an image that looks very nice, but it probably will not capture the mood of the actual room.

Instead, I shoot using available light or supplement that light with a minimal number of strobes. For the Blue Moon, I shot almost entirely with available light. In the Duchossois condo, Kari asked me to bring the views from the 12th floor windows into my photos. So for these images, I needed to raise the lighting level of the rooms to match that of the outdoors, and that required strobes.

It may be a surprise that shooting on a yacht is not much different than shooting in any other residence. The Blue Moon is certainly very large and spacious; there was no reason to bring out my ultra-wide angle lenses. To overcome the variations in light and dark that can ruin an available-light photo, I build my photographs in layers. I'll shoot each image perhaps 20 times at different exposure settings, with the camera locked down on a tripod. Back at my office, I'll choose different exposures for different areas of the room, combining them in PhotoShop into the final image.

This method overcomes the rather limited latitude inherent in digital sensors and allows me to work without hiding strobes here and there throughout the room. (For a detailed discussion of my method of building digital images, see my article for avMarketing, How to create effective AV systems photos.)

A major advantage of this method is that it allows me to work much faster on site than most photographers (although I do spend a lot more time in post-production than they will). For Kari, that meant I was able to deliver eight or more images of each location in a day’s shooting, where she is used to getting three or four.

You may ask how the results compare to more traditional photographic methods. I encourage you to judge for yourself. Click for images of the yacht Blue Moon and of other AV systems I've photographed. AMX was pleased enough to hire me for two more residential shoots later this fall.