Three ways to take better pictures of stately homes

Explore the grounds of any stately home and there are plenty of photo opportunities on offer

How to shoot the stately house

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Only the biggest and most popular stately homes are open to the public during the winter months, meaning that it will be di cult to get sunrises or sunsets. So either hope for sunny days for colour photography or billowing clouds for conversion to mono. Flat, grey skies are no good to anyone.

As for shooting the stately home, there are two options… we can either place the house in the wider landscape or shoot from a closer, architectural perspective. With the rst option, the objective is to show the country house as the dominant feature, with elements such as lakes, pathways or gardens as compositional elements to draw the eye in. Following the rule of thirds would have you place the house and horizon on the top horizontal third, but you could also position it on one of the vertical thirds. A wide-angle lens is usually required, meaning anything from 18-28mm should work.

You’ll usually need plenty of depth of eld, 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. Use a circular polariser to enhance the skies, but bear in mind that there’s usually a one- or two-stop hit to the light levels so you may need to increase the ISO accordingly. Another use for a polariser could be to compose the scene with a lake in the foreground. Here, the lter can maximise the reŠections on the water or reduce them so you can see the lake bed.

A second approach is to feature the house more prominently and use the gardens in the foreground as the lead-in detail. The danger of getting closer is that the verticals of the house start falling away unless you can use a specialist tilt-shift lens to correct this, or you could have a go at free-lensing – this is 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, leave enough space on either side of the house when shooting because the correction process will use much of that up. With less scenery to encapsulate, focus a third of the way into the scene and use an aperture of around f/11.

Castle Howard, near York, with a foreground of da odils and pathway leading to the house.

Here, we placed the house in the wider landscape, shooting from over the lake.