The business of photography and retouching
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.
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.
There are three types of colour photographs: those with bad colour, those with accurate colour and those with pleasing colour.
If the skin tones in your business portrait don’t look good or if your pictures have an overall colour cast, then your photos have a bad colour balance.
Accurate colour is required when the colours in a photo must match the real-life colours. For example, clothing colours in a catalog should match the actual colours.
Pleasing colour is for pictures that have to look nice rather than be absolutely accurate. Portraits often have pleasing colour because a nice skin tone is usually preferred over accurate skin colour.
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I do real estate photography for construction companies that build or renovate homes in the greater Toronto area. Often I photograph a home before construction has begun and then return weeks or months later to picture the finished work.
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(With apologies to Charles Dickens)
It was the best of houses, it was the worst of houses, it was the age of beauty, it was the age of squalor, it was the epoch of style, it was the epoch of simplicity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of disrepair . . .
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Everyone has heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. According to a real estate study, a (professional) picture is worth at least a thousand dollars.
A 2010 Wall Street Journal article cited a study done by a Seattle brokerage house which showed that professional photography increases the sale price of a home by anywhere from $934 to $116,000.
The reason for this is simple:
Better quality photography => more attention => more customers => more money.
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Corporate photographers and commercial photographers often produce pictures of buildings, factories and retail locations.
Customers will sometimes request the digital removal of objects such as poles, road signs, overhead wires, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc., from exterior photos.
What’s funny about such requests is the customer assumes that once an object is erased, whatever was behind that object will automatically become visible. But as every photographer knows, when something is digitally removed from a photo, it just leaves a blank spot in the picture.
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