First of all I want to clarify that I agree with this reader. The Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 is one of the finest ultra-wide angle lenses on the planet! And it’s not that a full frame 14mm isn’t suitable for real estate it’s that when shooting below 24mm you get more perspective distortion. Some visually sophisticated viewers of your work will notice perspective distortion and other less visually sophisticated viewers won’t.

What I mean by perspective distortion is the shape of the pot in the little potted tree in the bottom left corner. We all know that this pot has a round top but round objects in the corners of photos shot with a wide angle zoom at 16mm like this shot will appear oval. Rectangular tables won’t look rectangular and floors sometimes take on some strange looking slopes. All objects in the corners have this wacky look but the only ones viewers notice are the objects that they have expectations about. It’s like converging verticals, we know walls are vertical and when they don’t look like we expect we notice.

When I got my first full frame camera body and a 16-35mm zoom I was just like the reader that uses his 14mm all the time. I was in LOVE with 16mm! I swear I didn’t take the lens off 16mm for a year! During this period, I had potential buyers that accused me of trying to deceive them by making rooms look bigger than they were. I had one of our listing customers characterize photos with perspective distortion as having a “cartoony look” and my wife would complain that some rooms in our listings looked like they were “bowling alleys” and send me back to reshoot.

What I pointed out to the reader in love with 14mm, is that you can get away with this visual “foolishness” when shooting for some real estate agents because they are that visually sophisticated. But you won’t get away with it if you shoot for an architect, designer or even an agent that subscribes to Architectural Digest! Ever notice that you don’t see 14mm and 16mm interior shots in Architectural Digest? It’s because AD’s target audience is a visually sophisticated.

So, I’m not saying, “don’t use your wide angle at 14mm”. I’m saying use it with restraint. Use it at 14mm in those funky little powder rooms or small rooms. Try to stay close to 24mm unless going wider is essential and when you shoot wide pay attention to objects in the corners of the photo and try to minimize those long straight bowling alley lines.

There are several methods:

1. Shoot more brackets than you need: With this method, you just always shoot 7 brackets two stops apart so you always capture more than enough dynamic range. The problem with this approach is that while most Nikon DSLRs shoot 7 brackets with the auto exposure bracket (AEB) function Canon DSLRs will only shoot 3. For Canon shooters the Promote external controller ($299) will allow you to shoot any number of brackets with any number of stops without touching the camera. This approach allows you to just do the same thing on every shot without having to think about metering the scene. The Promote works on Nikon bodies too. You can always do this manually with out a Promote but there is a high risk that you will move the camera body slightly while working the controls.
2. Measure the actual dynamic range: Michael Freeman has a great technique in his book, Mastering HDR Photography. In summary works like this:
   • Guess the shortest exposure needed to preserver highlights and shoot.
   • Check the highlight clipping warning and histogram. Correct exposure is the longest at which there is no highlight clipping.
   • Once the shortest exposure has been captured, set the shutter speed 2 stops slower and shoot the second frame.
   • Continue changing the shutter speed by 2 stops until the darkest shadows are mid-tones. Check this on the     histogram, the left edge of which should be in the middle of the graph.

It is worth noting that many real estate photographers doing HDR or Exposure Fusion are just shooting 3 brackets 2 stops apart and getting good results 90% of the time. What I’m talking about here is improving your work 5 or 10% of the time. It’s not huge but it’s significant.

The last subject in bracketing I want to mention is combining Flash with Exposure Fusion. I talk to more an more real estate photographers all the time that are adding a single Flash with Exposure Fusion. The reason is that combining one or more Flash brackets in a sequence of brackets has a positive effect on colors, white balance and make white woodwork crisper than it appears without Flash frames. The over all goal of adding Flash is to minimize post processing (adjustments needed after Photomatix processing). I’ll be covering this subject in more depth in the future.

As Jeremy points out, “…there’s immense educational value in lengthy examination/dissection of these examples“.

From a marketing point of view, this sequence of before and after shots shows that the difference between a casual snapshot and a carefully crafted and staged image is huge. This simple display is a powerful marketing presentation for why a client would want to pay top money for their services.

The other aspect of interior photography that Ashley and Marie’s before and after sequence illustrates is the impact of staging interiors. It is well known that a staged home will sell for more and sell faster than a vacant or unstaged  home and Ashley and Marie’s before and after sequence demonstrates why.

Thanks Ashley and Marie for this great set of examples and thanks to Jeremy Esland for pointing it out.

“…so many photographers and videographers obsess over details – technical details – that NOBODY (except other photographers and videographers) would ever notice or care about!

…If you want to make a business out of this, you need to work lean, mean and FAST. You need to price yourself competitively for whatever your particular market will bear …

Spend your time figuring out how to cut corners to get a product out FAST and CHEAP. It needs to be good ENOUGH – not perfect. If you obsess over perfection, you’ll be pursuing a hobby, not a profitable business.

If you can work fast, cut the corners that don’t matter to anyone but you, and have a good and fast workflow, this is a great business! …”

Fred is right on, real estate photographers need to be in touch with both the quality and the price aspects of their market. I say “their” market because all markets are not the same. The market is determined by agents expectations and sophistication and that varies. This is why real estate photography is different that what I call “architectural” photography. My definition of architectural photography is where the clients are architects and designers and professions that are trained in the visual arts and thus have high visual expectations.

While Michael is demonstrating this technique with HDR, there’s no reason this technique has to only be used with HDR. You could just as well use it with a single exposure. It all depends on if the dynamic range in the scene calls for HDR. This is just another technique for your tool kit. Many real estate photographers will handle this problem with placing remote triggered flashes on the porch or area that needs an extra bit of light.

Well here’s another iPhone app that takes sun calculation to a completely new level. Unfortunately the price is a whole new level too. This app is $30, which is pricey for an iPhone app. But, not all that bad when you consider this applications features:

1. Gives graphical representation of the sun’s position on a compass dial (azimuth) for any time of day, showing the sun’s elevation and proportional length of shadow an object would cast.
2. Shows a SkyView which is an overall view of the sun’s path in the sky through the day.
3. Gives a Inclinometer view that predicts the sun’s height at any given time in the day. Essentially an electronic inclinometer that reads in both time and angle.
4. Has an internal database of over 30,000 locations around the world, providing longitude, latitude, timezone and daylight savings information. There is an ability to save favorite locations and add the current location from GPS data (where a signal is available).

This application brings to mind the home-seller client that we had in 2002 that insisted that get a front-shot of his home with the sun at the perfect angle so there were no shadows from the tall Douglas firs around the home. If I’d had an iPhone and this app, I could have used the inclinometer part of this app on the front porch and predicted the times in the next few days that the sun would be at the correct angle. As it was, it took me about 4 trips back to get a shot that made him happy. I was happy to do whatever it took to make this client happy because we were getting a listing commision, but if you are charging for return trips you need a way to figure out how to get the shot in one trip. This app will help you do that.

David’s Interior Lighting Techniques: Last month I pointed out David Hobby’s article, over at strobist.com, on using free blogs for home tours but I just noticed that he did another post the next day that is a nice walk through of some techniques he used on shooting the interior shots for the tour. It’s worth a look if you haven’t seen it.

DxO Discount: DxO Labs is offering a 25% discount on DxO Optics Pro product through May 31. DxO Optics pro is popular with many real estate photographers. You either love it or you hate it. They have a trial version so you can see which side of the fence you are on.

Putting Watermarks on Your Photos in Photoshop Batch Mode: The link to this tutorial for using Photoshop batch mode to put watermarks on your photos has been sited several times in the PFRE flickr discussion group. I thought I’d re-post it here too for those that don’t frequent the flickr group.

First of all, doing a twilight shoot is almost always a special trip so most real estate photographers list a separate price for doing a twilight shoot. Here is the collective wisdom from the PFRE flickr group on what to charge for a twilight exterior shoot.

Here’s a summary of how to do an exterior twilight shoot:

1. Plan and schedule the shoot using the naval observatory site or the Focalware iPhone app. You need to be setup and ready about 15 min before sunset and the best light will start around 15 min after sunset and last for 10 to 15 minutes depending on the latitude and the sunset.
2. Turn on ALL the interior lights, landscaping lights and exterior lights if there are any. It’s easy to underestimate the amount of time it takes to get all the lights on, especially if the homeowner is not there to show you where all the switches are. I’ve found that many times the exterior spots can be too much. You can selectively turn each bulb off by unscrewing the bulb slightly. A small step ladder is handy for this.
3. Some photographers like to hose down the driveway or cement areas that are in the shot so they are wet for a twilight shot.
4. Use a tripod and cable release to eliminate camera vibration because exposure times will be several seconds or longer. If you don’t have a cable release use the interval timer to release the shutter.
5. Shoot raw so you will be able to adjust the white balance to your taste in post processing.
6. Set your camera to a low ISO (100) to get better color and less noise. This is probably not as important with newer high ISO DSLR bodies.
7. Set your camera on manual and use a aperture around f/5.6 or f/8. Lenses are typically sharpest around the mid-point of their aperture range. Adjust the shutter speed to produce a normal exposure. Check the LCD and adjust until the result looks good. A lot of bright lights can fool the light meter.
8. Flash or continuous lighting can improve the photo by adding extra light and drama to landscaping or areas of the exterior that are completely dark. See Vince Destefano’s (the master of twilight shoots) examples of how to use rechargeable spots for lighting accents.

Twilight shots can make a very ordinary home look dazzling and even hide ugly defects.

Everyone feel free to add to this list if I’ve missed

The upper shot on the right, is effectively a two wall shot and the bottom photo is a three wall shot of the same room. The two wall shot was one of the photos we used to market this home. I liked it the best of the 4 or 5 shots I took of this little living room and the stager, the agent, and the home owner all agreed with my choice. At the time I didn’t think about why we all liked the two wall shot the best.

After seeing a discussion in the PFRE flickr group on this subject I realized why the two wall shot feels more spacious and is visually more pleasing.

• The two wall shot does not show the whole room or give the viewer a reference for the size of the whole room so the size of the room is ambiguous.
• On the other hand the lower, three wall shot gives the viewer an absolute reference for the size of the room by showing all three walls. In this three wall shot the room feels smaller.
• Because ceiling line of the far wall is not straight the composition feels visually uncomfortable.
• Additionally, since I used a 16mm lens for this shot the three wall version has an exaggerated perspective that gives the image even more of an uncomfortable feel.

As Jeremy Esland explains in the PFRE flickr discussion on this subject, “as photographers, as long as we are aware of the potential effects, we are, of course, free to ignore them, compensate for them or even make use of them.”

So you can use a three wall shot to illustrate how large a room is but if you are not careful there can be some down sides of showing three walls.

What a great idea! I’m thinking that Canon shooters should be able to do this same thing with Canon’s RemoteCapture software. I’m going to try this out with RemoteCapture and my 1Ds this weekend and will report back. Anyone else for a time lapse shot?