Kilshane House

When I wasn’t finding and printing photographs from my library of images this weekend I was processing the bulk of the shots I took last weekend at Aileen and Neil’s wedding in Kilshane House, Tipperary.  I’m almost there – at the time of writing I have about 40 images left to process.  I’m somewhat limited in what I can post here, but this shot of the reception room in Kilshane House is worthy of a post.

The wedding coordinator at Kilshane was particularly keen to have some photos taken of the room before the guests entered, and with good reason.  It looked magnificent.  All credit for that, including how the room is lit, goes of course to the staff of Kilshane – this photograph is an available-light shot, and I’ve deliberately kept the white balance to show the warmth of the light that was present in the room.  The fairy lights on all six windows and the night lights on the table gave the room a magical feel and I can only imagine that Aileen and Neil were delighted with how the staff had presented the room when they walked in a short while later to join their guests for dinner.

Getting this shot involved standing on a chair at the extreme end of the room, with the camera held as close to the wall as possible, and using my wide angle lens at 17mm to take in all six of the windows.

Standing on a chair put the camera just about half way up the height of the room, which I guess has a ceiling of about 16 feet, and the benefit of that to the shot is that it keeps all the vertical lines vertical.

Wanting to keep the shot lit by the available light in the room only required a super-slow shutter speed of 1/5s, and because the camera was 8 feet in the air, it needed to be handheld.  With a wall to brace myself against, and the ability of the D300 to shoot at 6 frames per second, getting a sharp shot wasn’t too difficult actually.

I stopped the aperture down a little from it’s widest to keep a little more in focus – ideally for an architectural shot like this you would shoot at f/16 or so, but that was just not possible without a platform and tripod to steady the camera.

I think the multitude of light sources, which tend to go a little soft in even the sharpest of shots anyway, means I get away with this wider-than-preferred aperture, and it was a better option than bouncing flash to bring that shutter speed back up and losing the ambience of the room.

The final shot needs a little more work to remove the two human forms at the left of the frame, but it will be easy to do that as the shot just before is equally sharp and from the same viewpoint, so a little cloning from that shot to this will take care of that.

I get a lot of traffic to this site from google, and no doubt some people searching for Kilshane House will find this post – if you’re one of them and thinking of having your wedding there, this is one example of what you can expect the room to look like.