October 19th, 2009
I was having a discussion with reader “Uncle Louis” the last few days about alternatives for inexpensive manual flashes. Louis was complaining that he was having trouble finding the old Nikon classic manual flashes (SB-80dx and SB-26) that are so popular with real estate photographers. For the new comers, these flashes are popular because they [...]
April 28th, 2009
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 [...]
April 10th, 2009
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 [...]
March 31st, 2009
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 [...]
March 11th, 2009
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 [...]
March 9th, 2009
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 [...]
February 6th, 2009
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:
July 2nd, 2008
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.
May 1st, 2008
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 [...]
April 21st, 2008
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 [...]
