Arlington Duplex Flip

Nikon D200, Tokina 11-16mm @ 11mm (approx. 16mm full frame), ISO 400, f/8, 4/10 sec.

This is now the second house flip I've photographed for Teresa Bosch and company at Bosch Homes, LLC. They redesign, remodel, stage, and then sell the houses they work on. Teresa's work is excellent and I always find myself wanting different elements of the homes she works on in my own home. You can see what I mean in the photos.

As Teresa's end goal was to sell the home, I shot the photos with a real estate mindset. Wide, bright, and cheery. There were some definite challenges on this shoot, so I'd like to go into the process behind a couple of the photos I made for her.

At the top of this post is a version of the photo below that I made for my portfolio. You'll notice that the photo above is cropped tighter, has a little less color cast, and is missing the wires, ceiling fan pull cord, wall vents, and switch plates. You don't want stuff like that cluttering up your portfolio shots, but you can't do that sort of thing with a real estate photo, which is why I left it all in the shot below. It's also not cropped so as to make the space feel even bigger.

Classic real estate photography: wide, bright, and inviting. "Buy me."

One of the major challenges I faced during this shoot was the available ambient light outside. We weren't able to shoot the house until 4 pm, and it was close to 5 by the time I got to this room. Add in the rainy conditions and the fact that the days are getting shorter, and you get a pretty poorly lit window exposure. It's usually a really easy thing to control because you can use shutter speed to control the window exposure, and then add flash to illuminate the interior.

I did that here, but it starts to become an issue when you want light fixtures turned on in the house. To bring up a dim window exposure, you then run the risk of severely blowing out your fixtures. In the photo above, you can see that I'm getting close to that danger zone, and although everything worked out, the fixtures were contributing to the exposure more than I wanted them to, hence the warm glow. I think the warmth is actually fairly inviting in this photo, but the color cast does bother me a bit. If I had all day to make this photo, I could have done all sorts of things to fix these issues, but in real estate photography sometimes you have to compromise.

Oh, and if you're wondering why I even bother using flash when I have the fixtures contributing ambient light, the unlit photo below should be enough proof!

The ambient-light exposure of the above photo.

I mentioned before that the bedroom photo was shot around 5 pm. Well, the final photos I took of the house were in the kitchen and I was pushing 6 pm by the time I got around to those. By that time, the ambient light outside had dropped considerably and things were looking downright dark.

Let's walk through the whole process of the kitchen photo from start to finish. Keep in mind that I want the light fixtures on, I want the window to look bright and cheery, and I want to light the rest of the room to improve the color, quality, and direction of the light. The first step is usually to expose for the window and let the light fixtures fall where they may. Well, with the ambient outside light as low as it was, it would have turned the light fixtures into nuclear orbs. So, I was forced to do the opposite and expose for the light fixtures, letting the window go dark. Even so, I had the light fixtures maybe a tad on the hot side.

Ambient light photo of the kitchen. Check out that window!

Is that a window, or is it a black hole? Hard to tell! Okay, next I add some speedlights to bring up the kitchen the way I want to see it and we get the photo below.

The black hole is now reflecting one of my speedlights. Don't worry, we'll deal with that soon.

Notice how the speedlights help to erase a lot of the color cast from the fixtures, but there's still a warm glow from them. They also bring up the exposure level of the room, as well as create some soft, flattering light. That's all great, but we still have a really weird vibe with that dark window. This is the time for some Photoshop magic. I had pretty much already decided to take a separate exposure with the light fixtures turned off. That way they wouldn't go nuclear and I'd have my bright, cheery window. Then all I needed to do was mask the window in using Photoshop. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's not that hard either. I wouldn't want to do it on all of the photos in a real estate shoot, but I had no choice here. I certainly wouldn't want to deliver the above photo to my client!

A window exposure with the light fixtures turned off.

In order to get the window exposure above, my shutter speed was 8 seconds. 8 seconds!!! Ridiculous... what's wrong with me, right? But hey, you play the cards you're dealt. By contrast, the exposure for the fixtures was 1/10 of a second. If I'm doing my math correctly, that's a bit over six stops of light difference between the light fixtures and the outside ambient light. In this case, the difference is night and day. Oof. Sorry.

The final image, after using Photoshop to mask in the window from the previous exposure.

A nice side benefit from masking in the window was that I got rid of that pesky speedlight reflection. I could have moved the speedlight a bit to get it to go away, but once I knew that I'd be masking in the window, I didn't need to worry about it! The final product is a photo that no one (except you, dear reader) would expect was taken at 6 pm on a rainy, overcast fall day.

I'll share one more photo with you before I sign off, and this one was perhaps made more possible by the fact that it was so dark outside. During the walk-through, my client mentioned that she might like a shot like this, but not to worry about it if I didn't have time. The thing is, do you think I'm going to let a photo go by that my client said she might like? Nope! The photo, below.

The kind of kitchen detail that I love to grab if I can.

This isn't your typical real estate photo, but as I mentioned in the last blog post, I think detail shots can really help to bring in potential buyers. Couldn't you imagine yourself in this kitchen, candles lit, pouring a glass of wine after a long day? Maybe sneaking a nice cheese out of that fridge?

Ambient light only. The third candle didn't like me, so I had to clone in the glow in Photoshop.

Check out the ambient grab above. I made several test shots with only ambient light to see which exposure would make the candles look best. The rest of the ambient light in the photo is coming from the window that we discussed in the previous kitchen photo. It contributes very little, allowing me to then shape the light with my speedlights. If it had been bright outside, a lot more light would have been coming from that window. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but having a nearly blank slate upon which to create my own light was a nice change of pace.

Home Photoshoot for Impact Staging

Nikon D200, 18-70 mm 3.5-4.5 AF-S DX @ 18 mm, ISO 100, f/7.1, 1/5 sec.

Lest any of you think that I only shoot photos of my own living room, here's a peek behind the scenes at a recent photoshoot I did for MaryAnn Perkel, owner of Impact Staging & Organization here in Northern Virginia. She does an amazing job, and, for me as photographer, it's a pleasure to be able to focus on the composition and lighting without having to worry about the staging.

The photo at the top of this post was one of my favorites (exposed beams=awesome) and so I thought I'd do a quick walkthrough of how I created this image.

The first thing I always do (after staging, but, you know, she killed it) is to find my composition. Having already done a walkthrough of the house to determine which shots we'd be making, I already knew that I wanted to shoot this room straight-on. The symmetry of the windows around the fireplace, as well as the exposed wood beams kind of demanded that I compose the shot in this way. Then I'll usually handhold the camera to find a more exact composition. I'll move up and down, side to side, and play with various focal lengths. Next, I lock the camera down on my tripod and use a geared head to level it and fine-tune the composition.

The second thing to do is to find the ambient exposure. This usually comprises the windows and any light fixtures that I want to be illuminated. I had tried shots with both the ceiling fan lights on and off and decided during post-processing that the lights were a bit too distracting with all of the beautiful natural light coming through the windows. It's good to shoot both ways so that you have the options to choose from later.

My window exposure ended up being 1/5 sec at ISO 100 & f/7.1. Why ISO 100? Sigh. I don't know. I usually shoot closer to 400 so that my speedlights can hang in there, but I was thinking about trying to get the cleanest file possible since this was not a real estate shoot. I don't know if MaryAnn will ever want large prints of these, but in case she does, she'll have really clean files to use.

The ambient exposure, before adding flash.

The photo above shows the ambient exposure, and you can see my light stands on the left. They were there from a previous shot where this room was in the background, so they were hidden from view. It was as easy as repositioning them just a bit closer to the camera so that they fell out of view of the left side of the frame. There are two speedlights there, as well as a third resting on a piece of furniture near the other two. They're all aimed at a similar spot near the wall/ceiling joint in order to provide me with more power. Remember, I'm shooting at ISO 100 and these little speedlights don't have the power on their own to fill a huge room like this.

That being said, the ambient window exposure is providing me with a good amount of fill light in the room on which to add some flash. If it was pitch black in there after finding my window exposure, I would have been worried. As it was, I had a pretty good starting point, but adding the flash does two things. The most obvious is to bring up the exposure level of the room so that it appears bright and cheery, while the more subtle effect is that it adds depth and shape.

The exposure after flash has been added, with no retouching.

So the photo above shows the final shot, straight out of camera with zero adjustments. If you look in windows on either side of the fireplace, you will see the reflections from my flashes. They show up as large white blotches, most noticeable on the left-hand window. The reason they are not small reflections is because I am bouncing the speedlights off of the wall/ceiling, thereby increasing the size of the light source. It's great for creating soft light, but not so great when you have a lot of windows. Luckily, I had anticipated this and knew that I could easily clone those reflections out during post. If there had been something more complex outside, it would have been a harder task, but the trees all just meld together beautifully.

Because the photo was not going to be used for real estate, I had no problem cloning out the two outlet plates just above the fireplace. That's a big no-no for a real estate shot. Other post-processing included lens corrections, white balance, slight shadow-lifting, a touch of clarity, a slight S-curve to boost midrange contrast, and a tiny bit of sharpening. I apply a light touch with most of the post-processing. If you think you went a little too far, you went too far. Pull it back! Click the gallery below to see the photo before & after post-processing.

Another thing I like to do when shooting for a home stager or interior designer is to grab a closer shot, or detail. It's easy to do once you've got the lighting and exposure down, as long as the lights aren't in your new shot.

Grab a closer shot with the same light setup as the wide shot.

For the above shot, I moved the lights a little from where they were in the previous wider photo. Check out the setup shot below:

The setup shot. Speedlights are two LumoPro LP180s and a Nikon SB-26.

For the wide shot, the lights had been aimed at the wall-ceiling junction near the top left of that window above the piano. In order to trigger the lights, notice the radio receivers on top of the camera and attached to the lefthand light. The other two lights are trigged via their built-in optical slaves. That's quite the handy feature when using multiple lights on jobs like these!

I hope you've enjoyed this peek behind the scenes, and feel free to ask any questions in the comments.