Photo Shoot

A professional photographer came to our house today to take some photos for our builders (SAI) to use for award submissions. Fortunately, my new boss let me work from home so I could supervise. It was scheduled on rather short notice -- Wednesday afternoon! -- so SAI sent a cleaning lady to our house and Steve W personally came over to mow our lawn on Thursday. (Sadly, I had already left for work, so I didn't get a photo of that.) Josh and I really appreciated both of those favors since we didn't have much time to get the house ready on our own. We did have to spend a little time Thursday night de-cluttering, but otherwise it was still in decent shape from our open house a couple weeks ago.

I was just expecting a guy with an expensive camera around his neck, so when the photographer, Greg Hadley, arrived at 8:30 am with his assistant, Tricia, and an entire SUV full of equipment, I was a bit overwhelmed. I hadn't realized it was going to be such a big production. Greg is an architectural photographer, and has all sorts of fancy lights, tripods, props, and machines that go "ping!" Susan Colwell, who does marketing for SAI, showed up soon after with some fortifications from Starbucks. Here are Tricia, Susan, and Greg setting up a shot of the kitchen from the dining room.
And here is just some of the equipment they brought into the house, including the laptop -- but not the Beatles Rock Band...
Here are some of the lights they set up in the living room. They are radio-controlled by Greg's camera, so they flash whenever he takes a picture, even if he's in another room.
This is how they 'staged' the kitchen for the photo shoot. Greg brought the oranges, flowers, juice, and tea kettle, but the rest of the props are ours -- just not in places we would normally put them.Greg and Susan check out some of his preliminary photos on his laptop. They spent a lot of time moving props -- and sometimes even furniture -- around to get just the right shot. If you looked at all the photos together, you might wonder if we own three identical ceramic trays or two candelabras that we keep in different rooms. And you might think I love yellow chrysanthemums so much that I have them in every room in the house. (You would be sorely mistaken.) One of the reasons Greg wanted to come today was that the forecast called for a clear, sunny day. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a gray, rainy day instead. He was clearly peeved about that, but there were a few brief moments in the afternoon when the sun peeked through the clouds, so he tried to take advantage of the light in the family room and master bedroom, which are on the back of the house and get afternoon sun.
The master bath proved to be a bit tricky since it is one of the most visually impressive rooms, but there wasn't much space to set up his equipment. He ended up having to straddle the toilet to get a good shot of the tub enclosure.
He also took several photos of the tiled stairs. The light looks bad in the photo because the flash on my camera set off all of his lights, and my camera overcompensated by closing the aperture. I'm sure his photos will look much better.
Susan had to leave around 2, but Greg and Tricia worked through until 6 pm, with just a short break for lunch. They didn't shoot every room, but they did end up photographing more of the house than Greg had initially anticipated. He said he'd have to come back on a sunny day to get some good exterior shots, so there is still more to come, but I'm sure that will be far less disruptive. Fortunately, they decided the IKEA furniture and cluttered desk in my home office wasn't really worth documenting, so I was able to get a fair amount of work done while they were here.

Greg said I should be able to get copies of his photos from SAI, and that it was OK to use them on my blog as long as I gave him a photo credit, so hopefully I'll be able to post some of them here eventually.