nikonbrain Loc: Crystal River Florida

I have done many interior shoots including , airport terminals with no added lighting after I started using HDRI ......shooting for remodel contractors .....you don't need lights just normal ambient lights of the interior . Helps if your using a laptop with remote control from a teather ...adjusting f stop and shutter from the laptop ...I started with lights and umbrellas, but they are not needed.....

dsiner Loc: Kent, WA

Thanks for all the info it is greatly appreciated. Two questions remain, FX vs DX and for a on/off camera flash, which one? I am tending to stick with Nikon speedlights.

imagemeister Loc: mid east Florida

DX - unless you are making big bucks .....8-)

dsiner Loc: Kent, WA

Lol thanks but you just killed my sales pitch to my banker (wife) for a d850😃

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

I use cheap, manual speedlights. Off camera only. FX is best for a host of reasons. Only do DX if FX is out of your budget. But you can get a very decent used D810 for around $1600, and a D800E for around $1100, and either will blow away anything that comes out of a DX camera.

ORpilot Loc: Prineville, Or

One more thing..... I shoot RE in JPEG and at low resolution. I use my 24mp (set to low quality) a65 crop frame Sony w/Sigma 10-20mm and not my 42mp a99ii FF Sony. The agents want images for the internet MLS and photos printed on office printers. They rearly print larger than 8x10 for their show books. High resolution is not wanted. The agent does not want to spend time on their computer reduceing photos to be able to send them on the internet. Time is money. I always ask if they want internet images or HD images. Sometimes they want HD images for national magazines. They know that for $100-$300 they are not going to get Magazine quality images. So ask what they want. Good Luck

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

I do quite a bit of architectural interior and exterior work for may commercial clients. I have never been into the mass production real estate thing per se, mainly because the going rates in my city are rather low and many of the agents are shooting their own stuff with point and shoot camera s and i-Phones.

The real estate work I do get are from high end condo builders, executive apartment rentals companies and the realtors that are selling very costly homes, heritage properties (very old) and various suppliers to the industry like flooring manufacturers, interior decorators, architects, kitchen designers and installers. In the majority of theses areas, the budget is there- it's part of their advertising expenses.

In some of the cases, the lightning that I need to bring in can be rather complex, however, most of the times , I tend to keep it simple by using the existing lighting and very carefully applied fill light. I try to preserve the mood of the lighting that the architects, decorators have established.

If the lighting in the room is primarily daylight lighted, I fill with electronic flash or old fashioned BLUE PHOTO-FLOOD lamps. Sometimes I replace the ordinary light bulbs in table lamps with 250 Watt Photo-Floods so the color temperatures blend in nicely. If the room is primarily lighted with incandescent lamps, I fill in with incandescent quartz lighting. I keep the fill lighting a stop or two under the ambient light and that fills the shadows and maintains the natural mood. I also have a very old Color-Tran booster which brings 200 watt table lamp bulbs up to 3200°K and handles up to 6 lamps.

For someone who is just starting out in business, theses simple methods require a comparatively small investment in lighting gear and works very well.

In the next reply box, there are some images that I have made in this way. Sometimes, in kind of mundane exterior shots a shoot with a camera converted for inferred capture. There is also a few shots of me (that's the old geezer in the pictures) working on in a museum interior using just 2 old quartz lights- one for a kicker to bring out texture and the other for fill.. I am able to light a very vast interior spaces using mainly the existing light.

I established these methods way back in the film era when there was no post processing procedures to compensate for problematic lighting. Nowadays, what with automatic or custom white balance in the cameras and a bit of PhotoShop or Lightroom tweaking, it's so easy. I have virtually no radical post processing work and it's a breeze to balance indoor and outdoor lighting.

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

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