The kitchen is one of my favourite interior spaces to photograph. It’s usually the room in the house that the most time and effort (and money) has been spent on. It also offers quite a few challenges that need to be overcome and there is usually quite a lot of opportunity to style and dress the space to make the most of it. The kitchen is also one of the spaces where the quality of the photography makes an enormous difference to the resulting photographs. I’ve seen beautiful kitchens made to look average and great layouts look like awkward ones.

There is often a lot going on in a kitchen, multiple unit colours, competing focal points, lighting, worktops and of course the room itself. The first step as a photographer is to simplify this complicated space into a 2D image. The simpler the image is of the kitchen, the more a viewer is able to concentrate on the subject. Often the trick isn’t to show everything in a single image, but to find a composition that shows key interesting elements of the kitchen, concentrating particularly on more photogenic areas. Lighting is absolutely key too, very occasionally I will be blessed with perfect natural light, and I’ll need to do nothing. I could count on one hand the number of times this has happened in the last fifteen years though. Almost always is some form of light control needed, maybe means of cutting out some existing light but most commonly by adding in additional light.

Once the composition and lighting is sorted the last few bits to check are styling and removing anything that shouldn’t be in the shot – like wheelie bins outside the window, things of top of kitchen cupboards. One final review that everything is as you want it and then it’s on to do the same thing for the next shot.