Things I Have Removed From Beautiful Rooms

Beautiful rooms contain a surprising amount of stuff that does not want to be photographed.

Phone chargers.

Television remotes.

Dog bowls.

Tissue boxes.

Water bottles.

Dish soap.

Paper towels.

Electrical cords with apparently nowhere else to be.

And, occasionally, an object so inexplicably placed that no one in the room remembers owning it.

Most of these things aren’t ugly.

We simply stop seeing them.

That’s one of the strange things that happens when you live in a space. Your brain becomes wonderfully forgiving. The charger on the counter disappears. The crooked lampshade becomes perfectly acceptable. The dog bowl has lived there for six years and has therefore achieved architectural status.

The camera is considerably less sentimental.

It sees everything.

So before I photograph a room, things begin to move.

A chair comes forward three inches.

A pillow gets turned.

The giant countertop appliance goes on a brief vacation.

The trash can disappears.

Then something I moved five minutes ago occasionally comes back because, as it turns out, the room needed it.

This is the part of architectural and interior photography that doesn’t look particularly impressive from the outside.

There is no dramatic lighting equipment involved.

No expensive lens trick.

Sometimes I’m just standing perfectly still, staring at a chair.

Then I move it two inches.

And stare at it again.

But those two inches matter.

Because a photograph doesn’t experience a room the way we do. We walk through spaces. We turn our heads. We unconsciously ignore distractions and assemble hundreds of little impressions into one experience.

A photograph gets one frame.

Everything inside that frame has to belong there.

Which means photographing a beautiful room is rarely about adding more.

More flowers.

More pillows.

More objects.

More styling.

Quite often, it’s about knowing what can quietly leave.

And occasionally, after the light is right, the composition settles, the verticals behave, and everything finally feels effortless…

the room didn’t need more styling.

It just needed someone to hide the phone charger.