As the need for a castle gradually declined in the UK, noblemen and landowners looked for something more comfortable, but just as grand and imposing, to live in. The stately home, built and owned by the ruling upper classes, became a statement of wealth and power. They were also a hub for social events and provided employment for the local workforce.
Today, there are still over 3,000 stately homes in the UK, many owned by English Heritage or the National Trust when running a vast estate became unaffordable for individual families, thanks to taxes and upkeep costs.
The stately house
There are two ways of approaching photographing the house. Either you show it as part of the landscape, so place it in the distance with gardens and lakes in the foreground, or you shoot from closer up, from an architectural perspective. Let’s take the distance shots first.
Only the biggest and most popular stately homes are open during the winter months, when you have the chance to get sunsets and sunrises, because of the times they will be open. Mostly, opening times are March/April to September/October, so it’s late in the year when you might get a sunset, right at the end of the day.
Normally, though, it’s best to either hope for sunny days for color photography, or billowing clouds for conversion to mono. Flat, grey skies are friends to no-one.
The objective, then, is to show the country house as the dominant feature in the landscape, with other elements, such as lakes, pathways, gardens, trees and so on, as compositional elements that draw the eye up to the house.
The rule of thirds here would have you place the house and horizon on the top horizontal third, but rather than keep the house central, unless there’s a distinct symmetry to the shot, position it on one of the vertical thirds. A wide-angle lens is usually required, which means (depending on what’s in front of you) anything from 18 to 28mm.
You’ll usually need plenty of depth of field, so dial in f/16 or f/22 and focus a third of the way into the scene. Aim to have the sun either behind you, or to one side, so that the light falls on the stonework and the house isn’t backlit. It can be worth deploying a circular polarizer filter to enhance the skies, especially if there are some fluffy, white clouds about, as this will help make them stand out.
Bear in mind that there’s usually a 1 or 2-stop hit to the light levels when using a polarizer, so when combining that with an f/22 aperture you may need to up the ISO, find something stable for the camera to rest on or resort to a tripod.
The other use for the polariser is if you manage to compose the scene with a lake in the foreground. Here the filter can be used to either maximize the reflections on the water or, the opposite, reduce them so that you can see through to the lake bed.
The other approach is to feature the house much more prominently and use the gardens in the foreground as the lead-in detail.
The danger of getting much closer is that the verticals of the house start falling away, unless you can employ a specialist tilt-shift lens to correct this, or you fancy having a go at free-lensing where you detach the lens from the camera body and try angling it yourself.
If you’re going to correct the verticals in Photoshop afterwards, make sure there’s some space on either side of the house because the correction process itself will use up some of that. With less scenery to encapsulate, focus a third of the way into the scene and use an aperture of around f/11.
If you’re shooting early in the morning, it’s worth keeping an eye on the white balance as the light might have more blue tones than you want. Ideally shoot RAW files, so that the color temperature can be more easily tweaked later. Otherwise, try some of the sunny sky or cloudy sky presets, or dial in 5600K or 6500K to ensure the stonework retains a nice color in the sunlight.
What to find outside
The other attractions of stately homes are the gardens and the interiors. For the gardens, it can be anything from close-up or macro shots of some of the flowers, to an interesting architectural or landscape feature in the garden.
On a recent trip to Bowood House in Wiltshire, I discovered a purpose-built waterfall behind the lake, while other properties often have a folly or arboretum. On the bigger estates you can also find the vast tracts of parkland are inhabited by herds of deer, which is an opportunity for telephoto work and wildlife photos.
Discovering the treasures inside
The interiors present a range of challenges, starting with the fact that flash photography and tripods are usually not allowed. So, reduced available light means fighting with the shutter speed to avoid camera shake.
A wide-angle lens helps here, the shorter focal lengths enabling handheld shots where a telephoto wouldn’t. Plus, with restricted access to most rooms, you want a wide view, unless it’s down a corridor. Anything from 16 to 28mm works well, but be wary of objects close to the camera becoming unduly distorted.
What aperture to use, though? How much depth of field do you want in a scene that consists of just a room? Well, the wide-angle lens gives more depth of field than a telephoto, so try f/5.6 in aperture priority mode and see what kind of shutter speed you get.
Your camera type, whether the lens has optical stabilization, and how steady your hands are, all determine the minimum shutter speed you can hand-hold at. Personally, I draw the line at 1/20 or 1/30 sec before I reach for the ISO dial.
If the shutter speed is too slow, increase the ISO by whatever you need to get that minimum speed, rather than just letting auto ISO take over. This isn’t a fast-shooting situation; you’ve got time to work it out.
As well as the interesting personal rooms on offer, there are other places that offer photographic value, such as hallways with ornate, vaulted ceilings; kitchens, with old fashioned equipment; chapels; and spiral or grand staircases.
What almost all the scenes will have in common, though, is mixed lighting. There will generally be incandescent or tungsten lamps inside and daylight coming through the windows.
Firstly, it’s tricky to get a correct exposure for situations like this, and if there’s too much contrast between light and dark then it might not be that practical. Generally, if you expose for the room, the highlighted windows will blow out, but if you expose for the windows, the rest of the room will be pitch black.
Obviously shooting RAW is essential here, but it’s safer to get an exposure that retains the highlights, because you can pimp the shadows in Photoshop later. An HDR mode will also help because it’s likely that you won’t have access to a tripod, so taking multiple exposure to combine them later will be impractical.
With the mixed light sources, the other issue is going to be white balance. The incandescent lamps will have a temperature of around 2800K, tungsten halogen is 3200K, fluorescent light comes in a bit higher at around 4,500K but the daylight coming through the window can be 5,000-6,000K for sunny weather and up to 8000K for cloudy days.
So in practice that means that the window light areas tend to be blue, the desk lamps tend to be orange. The camera generally only applies one setting to the whole scene, so if it sets the white balance at say, 3,000K to make the light from the desk lamps more white, then the rest of the scene, illuminated by daylight, will become noticeably blue.
It’s much better to go the other way, tweak the white balance up to 6000K to make the daylight areas a nice, neutral color, and let the areas around the desk lamps have a more golden orange tone. You can either do it in camera at the time, or adjust accordingly when processing the RAW files.
Custom white balance
This scene has competing light sources with incandescent to the left and window light at the back. That means the color temperature on one side is different to the other. Here, a custom setting of 6,000K was used to stop the window light turning blue, while retaining a pleasant orange glow around the desk lamps.
To shoot stately homes you'll need a wide-angle lens. Obviously you'll need to carry all your kit about in a handy backpack as well.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
