Photography For Real Estate

I got a call for help today from Karl who will be shooting a large 130 room mountain lodge in Arizona next week. Karl says he has a couple of strobes and remote triggers but no umbrellas. He’ll be shooting Sunday through Thursday and would like to have some suggestions “particularly on lighting/possible placements and [...]

There was a recent article in USA Today that both promotes Joe McNally’s new book, The Hotshoe Diaries, and talks about the huge trend that’s been going on towards using small strobes. Much of Joes book gives insights on using small strobes from the point of view of a Nikon shooter. Apparently, it’s valuable as [...]

I first discovered the Atticfire site and did a post on it back in Oct of 2007. Since that time participants in the PFRE discussion group managed to reverse engineer how the Atticfire team creates the dramatic effect in their images. Because back in 2007 I pestered Eric Prine to tell me what they were [...]

Last month PocketWizard announced the MiniTT1 and FlexTT5. The significance to real estate photographers is that before these two new products using neither Canon’s E-TTL II or Nikon’s i-TTL CLS automatic flash controls was not very practical because the range of both of these infrared triggering systems was too limited for shooting real estate. These [...]

Sylvia Guardia described a technique to me that she and others are using to get the best of both flash lighting and HDR. The image on the right (actually the first two images in her Spa Hilton Papagayo series) was made by shooting 3 HDR shots with a flash. Then after processing the the 3 [...]

Because Scott Hargis’s post back in 2007 is so popular and it only mentions Cactus strobe triggers I want talk more triggering multiple strobes. In the context of shooting real estate there are three practical alternatives for triggering multiple strobes. See this video for a good summary of strobe lighting basics:

A number of weeks ago Thomas Grubba did a  tutorial in the PFRE flickr discussion group on how to control the quality of light. I think Thomas’s tutorial is a significant and is worth highlighting. Thomas discusses four different qualities of light created by the Stofen diffuser cap, wide-angle diffusers and no diffuser at all.

I want talk about lighting choices for real estate photography. Lighting is probably the biggest challenge for those starting out in real estate photography. There isn’t any one right way to light interiors. I’ve seen beautiful images made with each of these techniques. What I see and hear after talking to hundreds of real estate [...]

Mason Trullinger has posted two multiple flash build-up examples in the flickr discussion group: Office example Bathroom example The build-ups are a sequence of photos that show the effect adding each one of several flashes when lighting a room. Mason has included notes on each photo pointing out the placement and flash power settings. This [...]

Registration is now open for the Seattle Photography For Real Estate workshop on April, 25. Click here for the schedule and full details. Or click on the Seattle Workshop button along the top of the header image. Scott Hargis has agreed to fly up to Seattle and present the first ever Scott Hargis Lighting with [...]

I’ve just changed the poll on the left hand side-bar. The new poll asks: What is your main method of lighting for real estate photography?As usual I’ve moved the summary of final results of the last poll on real estate photography pricing up to the “poll pesults” page on the button above the header images. [...]

There is a wonderful discussion that has been going on for a couple days in the PFRE flickr discussion group. dtruax pointed out that there are several different styles or approaches to interior photography on display in the flickr photo discussion group. One approach uses mostly natural light and the other uses multiple strobes to [...]

Put this on you calendar: This Friday (2/1) at 8:00PM PST Scott will have a online interview on the Architecture forum of photocamel.com talking about his technique of lighting rooms with small off camera flash. I believe the interview text will also be available for reading on the forum after the interview is over.

Some say yes, some say no. Reader David Palermo sent me some of his recent work testing HDR processing for interiors. David showed me the following images: www.davidpalermo.com/hdrtest.jpg www.davidpalermo.com/hdrtest2.jpg www.davidpalermo.com/hdrtest3.jpg

Marcus Newey has a great tutorial in the flicker discussion group that explains how to shoot multiple shots with a single flash and then combine them in photoshop to create a well lit composite photo. Marcus’s animated GIF above shows the multiple shots and how they are combined into the final image.This is good technique [...]

Some discussions I’ve had in the last week about HDR processing of real estate photos and some articles I’ve run across have got me thinking about how HDR fits into real estate photography. Anyone that has shot 360 panoramas will immediately appreciate the importance of HDR as a technique to control brightness in a situation [...]

I recently noticed a nice overview of HDR software that is in the Panotools Wiki. I thought that this was one of the best HDR software overviews I’ve seen. This link on the Panotools NG forum which is a forum of panographers that discuss PanoTools, panoramic imaging, and related technologies and techniques, front-ends such as [...]

It turns out that there IS wireless internet access here at the Skamokawa kayaking center here on the lower Columbia river! So I’m not off the “grid”. Consequently, I was looking through the PFRE flicker discussions and noticed this one that is particularly interesting on some work that Malcolm Waring is doing. This looks like [...]

First of all I need to point out that this is Scott Hargis’s post. Like many of you I’ve been admiring the way Scott uses a hand full of strobes to light a room to look like an Architectural Digest shoot and still keep the time to shoot a hole home within a few hours. [...]

In the flicker discussion group Gary Weinheimer gives us a great example of the difference between using a single strobe (the photo above) and using 3 strobes (the photo below). Pretty dramatic difference! The point I want to raise is that after you master the basics like straight walls, correcting lens distortion and getting white [...]