real estate photography

Photo Gear Purchases 2021

I’ve always wanted a panoramic tripod head to do real estate photography. A stitched panorama will have much less lens distortion than a single image shot with a very wide-angle lens.

High-quality panoramic heads are priced from about $400 to $900 and they have many features. But I only need to occasionally shoot a horizontal row of photos which can be stitched together.

Before buying an expensive panoramic head, I bought a 240mm nodal rail with a sliding camera mount for $35. There are shorter rails but a longer nodal rail can work with a wider range of lenses.

It turned out that this cheap, little attachment works perfectly for what I wanted to do. Did I mention it was cheap?

A $35 nodal rail purchased from Amazon. This 240mm rail is sold under a few different brand names and there are other nodal rails as low as $20. A nodal rail is easy to carry in a camera bag or even a coat pocket.

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Real Estate Photography of Bathrooms

Bathroom photos need straight verticals and good exposure for room lights. Dark shower stalls should be lightened. Distracting mirror reflections can be minimized or removed.

Real estate photographers can spend a lot of time in the bathroom.

Despite being the smallest room in a home, bathrooms are very important. So house photographers know to spend a lot of time making sure the bathroom photos look good.

The same photography principles apply whether a bathroom is large, small or anywhere in between.

Verticals must be 90° vertical, room lights must be properly exposed and the bathroom has to look clean and bright.

Bathroom photos are an important marketing tool for home builders and designers. Since most home owners want to update their bathrooms, builders and designers should have eye-catching bathroom photos on their web site. This will always draw customer interest. Bathrooms (and kitchens) are key selling points to any renovation or new home.

 

Real Estate Exteriors In Poor Weather

This house was photographed under an overcast sky about one hour before sunset on a windy, rainy, late autumn day. The photography couldn’t be rescheduled for a nicer day due to the location and availability of the house and the late time of year.

Photography of real estate exteriors is best done when the weather and sunlight are both perfect. But it’s not usually possible to wait for ideal conditions.
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Light It Up With Digital Flames

When I used to photograph new model homes, the higher-end properties often had a large wood-burning fireplace. When this type of home was to be photographed, the builder’s sales rep often arrived with a couple of fire logs under their arm. They would start a fire in the main fireplace to make the photos look better.

Today when I photograph houses, I’m often the only person in the home and there are no lit fireplaces. A gas fireplace might not yet be connected or the gas not turned on. Plus, for liability reasons, I won’t turn on any gas appliance. It’s also out of the question for the photographer to start a wood-burning fire, assuming that wood was even available.

Adding flames changes a fireplace from lifeless black hole to an important point of interest.

Photo retouching to the rescue.

It’s easy to digitally add flames to an otherwise empty fireplace. A glowing fireplace adds life to a photo and will change a dull black hole into a room highlight.

If your real estate pictures have a fireplace, light it up with a nice fire.

 

Straightening Up

All real estate photographers straighten their photos so that vertical lines are in fact 90° vertical or very close to it. This isn’t difficult to do. But not all photographers straighten horizontal lines that have been distorted by a wide-angle lens.

Straightening horizontals is a bit more difficult and may not always be entirely possible. Wide-angle lens distortion is a fact of physics.

A very wide-angle lens was used to show the full width of the room and entire stairway. Verticals (i.e. walls) were corrected to 90° vertical. Then the stairs and the ceiling above the stairs were straightened to 0° horizontal.

There are no automatic, one-click solutions to fix crooked horizontals especially if only a portion of the photo needs to be corrected. Photoshop has its Adaptive Wide Angle Filter which can work miracles. Sometimes a photo can be separated into sections and each section corrected on its own using various transform tools. In the photo above, the picture was split into two sections where the dividing line was the edge of the glass wall.

 

Real Estate Photography, Large Bathrooms

It’s easier to photograph a large bathroom than a small bathroom and large bathrooms always look better.

A large bathroom can be photographed in a single shot so minimal photo magic is required. There’s usually no need to blend or stitch multiple photos together.

A photo of a large bathroom usually doesn’t require too much retouching. Vertical lines need to be straightened and then colour, brightness and contrast have to be adjusted.

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Real Estate Photography, Small Bathrooms

Photographing small bathrooms is usually a challenge. It can be difficult to get the camera into the best position and your reflection is visible in mirrors and glass doors. Plus, a wide-angle lens creates lots of distortion in a small room.

A shift lens can sometimes be used to prevent your reflection appearing in a mirror or glass door. But getting all or most of a tiny bathroom in a picture usually requires some photo magic.

This bathroom is smaller than it appears in this photo. No matter where I stood, I was always visible in the mirror.

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