Trinity Place | Lobby

This photo was taken in the lobby of one of the many apartment rental properties owned and developed by Angelo Sangiacomo. He has been purchasing and developing San Francisco properties for over four decades. Although a San Francisco native, his strong Italian roots played a major role in his decision to furnish this lobby with handpicked, Italian marble slabs in place of a more conventional front dest and seating area.

Knowing the background of my client, while composing this shot, I really wanted these marble furnishing to stand out and show off their natural beauty and contrasting geometric shapes. However, the main purpose of the shot was to show off the lobby as a whole. I decided to set up my camera pretty low to the ground and use a wide focal length in order to let the white marble be a prominent feature of the foreground - even more so with the natural distortion of the lens - while still being able to capture the clean open space of the lobby and the marble desk in the background. The angle I chose was meant to lead the eye from marble slab to marble slab, foreground to background and incorporate the empty space in between by shaping it and allowing it to help highlight the furnishings and show off the size of the lobby.

There was a lot of light coming in through the windows, which I just had to embrace and deal with. The time of day probably wasn't the best for this shot and I was working with very limited equipment, just my camera and lens, no lights or giant scrims (probably would have been very handy to avoid shadow casts). The best I could do was shoot bracketed and mentally prepare for post-processing. While shooting I made sure I had a good interior exposure and one for the windows and that was that.

In post, I deepened shadows, brought out highlights and fixed any weird color casts. Which really, I just desaturated the entire interior to bring it back to it's natural black and white color scheme. The window replacement was done during a hot and heavy date with my pen tool to create a layer mask. I actually replaced the view of the foreground windows with a separate exterior shot of this same building that I just flipped and skewed to a realistic perspective. The other side of the street isn't fully developed yet, and the dingy view really took away from the interior. Although not a realistic window view, I justify the replacement in that it's relatively subtle and keeps the eye focused on the interior rather than having the ugly view ruin the whole photo. And, the client was happy with it, so I have no ethical regrets.