IN mark’s BAG
01 Canon EOS 5d Mark iv
A brilliant camera body, tough and solid, it produces wonderful files with hardly any noise (shooting at a low ISO) and can be chucked around without any worries. It’s backed up with a Canon EOS 6D but that rarely, if ever, gets used. I am incredibly fond of the camera’s Wi-fi capabilities, which mean that I can see the work as I am doing it, on my ipad.
02 Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8l USM
this is a superb quality and very versatile all-round lens that gets used a lot! Heavy and well made, it really does best on my sturdy tripod. The images it produces are extremely sharp and crisp to the edge. I use it for everything, from room shots to portraits. It’s lovely when shot wide-open at f/2.8.
03 Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5l
this TS-E tilt-shift lens is absolutely essential for interiors and exteriors where converging verticals would be evident if you tried to ‘look up’ to get the top of a room into the shot. I find that it’s my go-to lens when shooting a room and trying to balance the ceiling and the floor. If I have a larger room and can stand far enough back, I prefer the other shift lens in my kit, the 45mm.
04 Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8
used in the same way as the 24mm tilt-shift, this lens has a narrower field of view – and, hence, a more natural perspective. It works well with tighter ‘vignette’ shots. The tightening of perspectives is more lifelike and often gets used by the magazines. The 24mm shift can get a bit ‘obvious’, and it can make the furniture in a room appear to zoom out of the image.
05 Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8l is ii USM
I love using this lens in the gardens that I shoot for magazines and book companies. It heightens perspective and ‘pulls together’ the disparate parts of an image. So, in a deep garden border, the flowers at the front and back appear to be much closer together. It’s very sharp, but quite heavy, so I always use it with a tripod.
06 Manfrotto 075 tripod
I have owned this tripod for 25 years – in fact, it was the first one that I bought! I’ve had many others since, but I always come back to this one. Perhaps the most important piece of kit in an interiors photographer’s armoury, it’s sturdy and unbreakable. I would not be without it; I shoot a lot of low-light level work, and in order to get a decent depth of field I need a good aperture. The only way to achieve this, with a low ISO, is with a tripod. And this one is the bee’s knees!