Rloren

I am a newbie and have recently been doing a lot of reading and research on real estate photography. I picked three houses from the for sale listings just to compare the photographs

The first house was a real dump..$39,900.00. You could tell the photographer just ran in shot automatic and ran out.

The second house was about $300,000.00. There were some automatic shots but a lot more care was taken in the interior to balance the lighting. I would probably rate it as..really good photos.

The third house was about 4 million dollars...ouch...The photos were at a whole new level, stunning, as close to perfection as one could possibly get with perfect soft light balance in each room.

My question is: Can you get close to perfection with just HDR and then go to Photoshop? My guess is the photographer used a lot of back lighting to balance each room perfectly. What do you think? Thanks....

rjaywallace Loc: Wisconsin

There is a marked difference between presenting a home as the best it can be and portraying it as better than it really is. Buyers are on to how Photoshop is often used to "enhance" real estate listings. Welcome to UHH.

JPL

Yes, I guess the photographer used in the most expensive house is a good and experienced photographer who controls the light at the location. You can improve your photos a lot with hdr. Best for you would be to practice and see how it goes. It is very easy actually, either in camera or with many photo editing programs and special hdr programs.

bdk Loc: Sanibel Fl.

When you get into high end homes, RE photographers specialize in this area. They stage the rooms, set up lighting etc. Though HDR may give you good pix, its a LOT more than that. when I sold my home I took the Pix , some took a lot of work to get right.....One thing I learned was stick your arm out as far as it will go, then do a thumbs up in the room, Now move your head left or right just an inch. See how the view changes, your thumb is now more to the left or right and things in the room look different. You have to find that one perfect spot to shoot from . Moving just a few inches in a room can make all the difference in a pic.

The best time to shoot outside is at dusk and turn on all the outside lights, then select F22 to get that star affect from the lights . There is a lot of books on RE photography, some free from Amazon kindle

Rongnongno Loc: FL

It is a specialized field best not left to amateurs.

Point of view, lens, lighting, room preparation... So much goes on that, well, you get what you pay for.

tgreenhaw

Its hard to comment on the photos without seeing them - perhaps pass on the links?

High end homes tend to have better lighting so that may be a big part of the difference you see. Also high end homes will be shot by a pro whereas low end homes will have smartphone snapshots from the owner or agent.

I'm interested to see a flood of advice on state of the art real estate photography, but here are some of the things that come to my mind:

+ Shoot during the day with all the window treatments opened.

+ Specifically tell the agent that you want to shoot the house when it's clean and unoccupied.

+ Invest in the best ultra wide zoom or prime you can afford - this will be your bread and butter. I shoot Canon, so that influences my equipment recommendations. If you can justify the cost get a Canon EF 11-24mm f/4 L. If you are on a budget, get an EF-S 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM for a crop sensor camera like the 80D.

+ Use a tripod and available light with a respectably low noise ISO setting, but if you must light, use off camera flash and a diffusor.

+ Try a circular polarizer to reduce reflections - especially for outdoor shots or kitchens with glass cabinet doors.

+ Get a Ricoh Theta S spherical panoramic camera (about $350) and also check out Round.me, a site that allows you to make good quality VR tours without a lot of hassle. The Ricoh provides pretty good quality and is simplicity itself to use. If you have a lot of time and quality must be inscrutable, there are other ways to make spherical panoramas, but it is fiddly and time consuming.

I'm not sure about HDR for real estate. When I read HDR I perceive High Dynamic Range photography with exaggerated colors and contrast. Personally, I think real estate photography should be realistic while maximizing a home's esthetic potential. That said if a home is dark and the opened windows are bright, using something like HDR or other post processing techniques to combine multiple bracketed exposures is sometimes necessary.

Like all good photography, you are telling a story. Instead of simply making a photographic inventory of each room, try to create a visual experience of a guided tour showcasing a home's most charming aspects.

Rloren

http://www.ctpost.com/realestate/article/Habitat-Eye-popping-showpiece-in-Fairfield-10904440.php

Here is the link...hopefully it opens..What do you think?

tgreenhaw

Nice house. Definitely used a nice ultra wide lens and maybe even a drone.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

HDR is used as a last resort. Keep that in mind.

You can not get "perfection" unless you have the place properly staged, and you take the steps to have 100% control over your lighting. for RE in particular, lighting is 95% of your image quality.

Ultra wide angles are less desirable than stitched panos shot with shorter lenses. There are several images in this link - http://www.ctpost.com/realestate/article/Habitat-Eye-popping-showpiece-in-Fairfield-10904440.php#item-38492 - you provided that provide a false perspective view typical of ultra wide angle lenses, and there are other problems:
3
4 - I am sure that small table in the foreground on the right side is not oval-shaped
7 - the newel post seems to occupy 25% of the lower half of the image
8 - room looks too large, and the foreground has no-nos for RE - two pieces of furniture that are incompletely shown
10 - giant newel post again, better comp would show the bottom of the post, and the skylight - would have been included if a pano was shot and the camera was in portrait mode
11 - Lighting is poor, seems to come mostly from the camera's POV, ultra wide lens used which renders the left wall as huge and disproportionate
15 - UWA exaggerated extension distortion again, chair on left only partially shown
16 - table looks like a trapeziod than a rectangle - misleading, caused by UWA lens
20 - piece of plant hanging out on the right, base of table missing, a lower POV would have been better, and a pano, possibly even with this lens but in portrait mode, would have shown the floor and the ceilign better
21 - UWA distortion - lamp on left is huge and out of scale

And so on - this is nice effort - clearly by someone who knows lighting and how to use a camera, decent staging, but lots of composition/post processing errors, and too much use of an ultra wide lens to "fit it all in" when a stitched pano would have provided a more "natural" and perceptually more accurate rendition.

I suppose this kind of work is acceptable to the owner and the agent. If it were my house, it wouldn't be. For a $4M house I would expect images to match. These don't quite make the grade.

Rloren

Thanks a lot for your input. I should have posted the link in my original post. That's what I was looking for about HDR. OK..last resort, get the lighting right.! I'm digesting everything here..Thank you...

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

What's nice about HDR is that you can expose for both bright and dark areas and present a well-balanced image. You can do it without PS. HDR need not have the grunge look that we often see. Here are some links

http://www.lightstalking.com/how-to-do-hdr/
http://captainkimo.com/hdr-software-review-comparison/
http://digital-photography-school.com/step-by-step-how-to-use-hdr-merge-in-lightroom/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmRFpM_j8RY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmL1Ahug_GM

boberic Loc: Quiet Corner, Connecticut. Ex long Islander

This house was professionally staged, and photographed by a pro, with high end gear. No casual photographer could get this kind of result. It wouldn't surprise me that the total cost was north of 100 grand

Rloren

That's what I was thinking, kinda' wow, how did he do that. While Gene pointed out some technical errors...the average eye or prospective buyer wouldn't pick that up.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

For the photography, including the Drone shot? Not even close. In Los Angeles, one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, a professionally done photo/drone/graphics shoot will cost about $3500. May seem expensive, but a professionally done presentation can add $30,000 to the selling price of a home.

boberic Loc: Quiet Corner, Connecticut. Ex long Islander

I wa referring to the staging as well. there is a great deal of very high end (expensive) real estate in south western connecticut. It's a very hot market.