It’s Photo Shoot Season

By Stacy Kunstel, New England Home homes editor and stylist

It’s shooting season. Not dove or duck or quail but photo shoot season, that short period of time when people and their guests have left their summer homes and we can get in them to photograph them for the magazine before it looks too fall like to be believed to be summer.

My Instagram feed has been one of ferry rides to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard mornings and Rhode Island sunsets. It all sounds very glamorous until you figure in the real-life aspects of it. Take last week for instance.

While most of you were enjoying barbecue or lounging on Labor Day I was driving three hours plus to catch a ferry to the Vineyard for a Tuesday photo shoot. I got in well after dark, ate a very late dinner (at a good restaurant I must confess) and got a restless six hours of sleep before I was off to the grocery store the next morning and in search of some farmer’s market flowers. That day we worked at the house until it was dark, ate a lovely dinner (Détente in Edgartown this time), got a few hours of sleep and was up at sunrise to get ready to shoot house number two.  Here are some shots from the houses you’ll be seeing in next summer’s issues.

Stone walls in Chillmark

Interior detail of a house designed by Debra Cedeno

Interior detail of an Edgartown home with art by Craig Carlisle

What does shooting a house entail? Showing up with a camera? Every time we shoot a house we unload an entire truck full of camera equipment, books, vases, flowers, computers, lights, baskets, throws, plants, you name it. Then, we pack it all up again at the end of the day. It’s sort of like moving a small apartment twice a day. The back of the truck typically looks like this.

Wednesday night was a race to the Martha’s Vineyard ferry, a one hour drive and a hotel so we could catch a 6:20 a.m. ferry to Nantucket. She looks good pulling into harbor. Of course there was no beach time for us, there were two more houses to shoot!

Really no complaints though. Not everyone gets to go to these amazing islands off our coast. Just getting to work there sometimes feels like a treat. Especially if this is the setting—photographer Michael Partenio on set of one of our locations.