A Closer Look

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm @ 55mm, ISO 400, f/7.1, 1/30 sec

As a real estate photographer, your ultimate goal is to persuade a prospective buyer to get off the couch, leave the comfort of their home, and come take a first-person look at a property. But there's something deeper going on psychologically and you need to understand it.

My wife gets this, and I get it now, but I didn't always understand. It's like the time we were buying a new car. I wanted to play it cool at the dealer (even though our car was on its last legs and we needed a new one ASAP), and I was trying. I'm not that great at negotiations, but I was trying. In the showroom, there happened to be a lovely green version of the model of car we were looking at (we had test-driven a white version). My wife proceeded to tell the salesman that she loved the color of the showroom car.

Crap.

And that was it, right? Although she wasn't the biggest fan of the car itself (and we've since outgrown it), she loved the color. That was where her heart was and it wasn't really going to budge.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm, ISO 100, f/7.1, 1/10 sec

It's like that with prospective home buyers too. You need to get them to fall in love with the property that you're photographing. Whether they realize it or not, deep down they will begin to imagine themselves living in that space, cooking there, entertaining there, relaxing there. They will envision their kids growing up there and eventually grandkids will visit and enjoy the home. Or some version of the above.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm @ 62mm, ISO 160, f/4.5, 1/10 sec

So, as a photographer, how do you do this? Well, staging is key, and so is proper lighting, composition, color, and all of the other things professional photographers think about. But the detail shots can really sell it. Details are not going to be your bread and butter real estate shots, but including a few in every shoot can really pay off. Not only are you over-delivering to your client, but you are planting the seed in those buyers' minds.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm @ 25mm, ISO 400, f/7.1, 1/20 sec

They need that house. No one else can have that house, and they can't imagine living anywhere else.

The cute little breakfast nook with the warm sunlight streaming in the window.

The cozy couch with the fluffy pillows and warm blanket.

The vase of fresh-cut flowers in the entryway.

The bathroom vanity sporting the latest high-end fixtures.

The chef's kitchen.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm @ 60mm, ISO 400, f/7.1, 1/20 sec

The reality is that, of course they can live in another house, but it's marketing, right? We don't need that luxury Jaguar, we don't need that bucket of chicken from Popeyes, we don't need a gecko-driven insurance policy.

Your photos are going to create the first impression for most prospective buyers. It's your photos that will get them in the door. Give them that little extra nudge with some subtle detail-oriented marketing.

Lighting Adjoining Spaces

Don't forget to make your adjoining spaces look as good as the primary space.

There's so much to remember when you're trying to make a great real estate photograph. Doing some light staging, deciding on the composition, leveling and focusing the camera, creating the light, and checking all of the details. And, usually, you're under the gun time-wise.

You can see how it would be easy to forget something. Oh yeah. That other room you can see in the shot. Oops. I forgot to [stage it/light it/move my bag of gear].

Today, we'll just focus on the lighting because it's probably the most obvious thing. An un-staged adjoining room is not ideal, but it's not the end of the world either. Things are usually farther off in the distance and it can be hard to see those little mistakes at a typical viewing size. It's another story if your client is planning on making big prints or you're shooting for a magazine!

The photo directly below demonstrates what happens when you don't light the adjoining space. Compare it to the photo at the top of this post, and you can see the drastic difference. You definitely don't want an adjoining room to look like a cavernous abyss. That's not inviting at all!

An unlit adjoining room can quickly give a real estate photo that spooky vibe.

Let's break down the lighting step by step so that you can understand what's going on. I even remembered to take behind-the-scenes photos with my iPhone!

Step 1: Find a good window exposure. Always subjective, but I opted to show less of my neighbor's house by blowing out the windows a bit more than usual.

Main light, bounced into the wall/ceiling joint.

Step 2: Bring up the main room with your first light. In this case, a speedlight placed back camera left, bounced off the wall/ceiling junction above the bay windows.

Main light for adjoining room.

Step 3: Bring up the adjoining room in similar fashion. This was done with another speedlight firing at the junction of two walls out of sight behind the pocket door. Note: pocket doors are awesome, so if you're shooting a room that has them, show them off a bit. Also, the door helped hide my speedlight and lightstand, although I did have a bit of room to play with over there.

Kicker light on a high-end highchair lightstand.

You could pretty much be done there, but I decided to add a third light in the dining room as a kicker. It helped to bring out a little definition in the chairs and kept things from getting too muddy in the table/chairs area.

All of the speedlights were trigged via their built-in optical slaves by another speedlight placed on-camera and aimed at the ceiling. The on-camera speedlight was powered down to 1/128th power so as to not affect the exposure. The nice thing about this is that you can bring up that power level if you decide you need a little fill light. Things were looking pretty good to me, so I opted to keep the power level down and use it only to trigger the other lights.

Even if you're not using lights and such, always remember to pay attention to the adjoining spaces. It can make a big difference in your final images!

To Light Or Not To Light

One of my trusty old Nikon SB-26 speedlights.

That is the question. I'd wager that the vast majority of home sellers, buyers, and real estate agents have no idea that a secret war is being waged by real estate photographers on internet forums around the world.

Yes, war. And oh, what a nerdy war it is. The argument over whether to use natural light (including daylight and fixtures), artificial light (speedlights, hot lights, strobes), or HDR (High Dynamic Range).

Without getting too deep into this discussion (do a web search and you'll find plenty if you're interested), I thought we'd do a quick comparison of the techniques in our lab. Before we get started, I will say that my preference is to augment the existing light with speedlights. Yes, I am a lighting nerd, but it goes deeper than that and we'll get into it. Especially with real estate shots, I like to use my lighting to mimic the existing natural light in the scene, if conditions allow. This way, the light can appear as natural as possible, but with the control that natural light doesn't always provide. We'll of course be using our handy-dandy living room lab to help us observe these different approaches.

First off, a natural light approach. Arguably the easiest (and possibly most frustrating) way to do things is to let the light come to you. Natural light at its best is the best, hands-down, but you don't always get to pick it. And when you have to do a real estate shoot, you don't always get the time of day that you want. Plus, what about the weather? Clouds, rain, direct sun, off-color light being bounced in a window off a neighbor's puce-colored house? Yes, puce, not puke.

You don't get any control with natural light, so you're at the mercy of the time of day and the elements. Good luck!

Natural light can be beautiful, but incredibly frustrating.

The light in the photo above isn't bad at all. I was lucky to have no direct sunlight streaming in, so it creates a soft overall feeling inside the room. When shooting interiors with natural light, you'd better have one of two things: Lots of windows, or some pretty well-designed/positioned light fixtures. In this case, the windows provide plenty of light, and a decent quality of light at that. The problem is that you can't really control your window exposure, so you will almost never be able to see the scene outside (not that you always want that, but it's nice to have the option). The workaround is to shoot closer to dawn or dusk, neither of which are always convenient (if an option at all).

With a little bit of post-processing, we're able to pull off a pretty decent real estate shot. In the photo above, I pulled up the shadows, toned down the whites and highlights, and so you can have a natural light photo with decent dynamic range (and my camera is 10 years old!).

Next up, HDR, which is short for High Dynamic Range. The oft-abused, yet overly popular stepchild of the photography world, HDR has become incredibly popular with run-and-gun real estate photographers. And you can understand why:

It's quick (not much longer than taking a natural light shot). It's easy (software does the blending for you). It lets you compress those highlights and shadows so that a viewer can see all of the details.

The problem is that it gets abused. Do a quick Google search of HDR photography and you'll see what I mean. Garish colors, angelic haloes around objects, flat lighting. Weird, but oddly attractive to many people.

There is a process called hand-blending where a photographer goes through the HDR process by layering multiple images in Photoshop, and then selectively revealing the different exposures to create a well-crafted final image. It can take an hour or more to hand-blend one photo.

On the other hand, the majority of HDR in real estate photography is done by loading the multiple exposures into software and letting the software decide which parts of each photo to blend together. The results are not always very pretty, and control is not its strong suit.

An HDR image created in Lightroom from seven different exposures.

My HDR experiment went surprisingly well, actually. I took a 7-exposure bracket (one exposed "properly" and then three shots underexposed and three shots overexposed). Then, I selected them all in Lightroom and let the software do its magic. Lightroom exercised impressive control and created a not-all-that-garish photo; however, I had little control over the process.

My preferred method, lighting with flash, is all about control and that's why I love it. You're essentially creating two exposures in one, because the ambient portion of the exposure and the flash lit portion of the exposure are affected separately by the shutter speed. Therefore, you can have your windows and fixtures exposed where you want them, and then light the room with flash to create a well-balanced photo.

A single exposure lit with multiple off-camera flashes.

Just like HDR, it can be easy to abuse flash, so I have a few rules that I tend to follow when using flash for real estate photography. The first rule is that it has to look as much like natural light as possible. When I'm shooting creative portraits or even interior design, I can get much more creative with the light, but real estate photography has to look like the real thing. Prospective home buyers don't want to walk into a space and have it look nothing like it did in the photos!

I always try to have my flash come from the same direction as the natural light. In an ideal world, that means throwing some umbrellas outside of the windows to augment the natural daylight. Practically, I don't always have time for that, so it means bouncing a flash off of an area near the windows (but still out of sight of the camera). In the example above, my main flash was being bounced from the upper right corner of the photo (just out of view). It's not perfect, but it's close to that window in the photo and so the direction of the light seems logical. A second flash is being used as a very subtle kicker coming in from the hallway off to the left of the toy box. This mimics light that could be bouncing in from that hall (which has a couple of windows). My third flash is on the camera, being bounced into the ceiling. It's not really contributing to the exposure; rather, its role is to fire the other flashes through their optical slaves.

Sound complicated and expensive? Not really. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but it's easy to start with an on camera flash bounced into the ceiling and see where that takes you. As far as cost, it's easy to find old, used speedlights. My Nikon SB-26's with the optical slaves usually cost between 70 to 100 bucks. Cheap, as far as camera gear goes!

My Camera is Better Than Yours

Oh boy. If I have to hear one more time...

"My cellphone camera is amazing. It takes better photos than..."

"My cousin has a really nice camera, so I just got him to take the photos of..."

"I just bought this 36-megapixel camera, so I'll be able to take my own photos of..."

If there's one cliche that applies to all of the above statements, it's the old adage, "It's not the tools; it's the carpenter."

These days, everyone is a photographer, or so it seems. Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat. Millions, billions of pictures. Every new phone has a great camera, and everyone and their uncle has a DSLR or mirrorless camera. But it's not about the tools. Let's put it in action, shall we?

Enter our mystery guest "photographer" (the party in question shall remain nameless as to protect their guil—innocence?). I asked this mystery photographer to take a photo our living room laboratory. The mystery shooter used my equipment, without my supervision, other than to provide a quick demonstration of how to focus and zoom. I also set the camera to program mode (read: auto). This exposure mode emulates the same kind of autoexposure mode that you'd find on most consumer cameras as well as cellphone cameras. The only parameter I provided was, "Pretend you are trying to make this room look its best for a real estate listing." The shot, below.

A real estate photo. You see ones just like this all over the interwebs.

Composition is a little wonky. Lines are little crooked, but not terrible. Vertical lines are a bit haywire. The camera actually got the exposure pretty close, but there's no additional light being added to the scene, so it's too dark inside. Compare to one of my photos of the same room:

Decent composition, straight lines all around, well-lit windows and room, clean and polished look.

"Well, Mr. It's-Not-The-Tools-It's-The-Photographer, why don't you just shoot with a cellphone camera?"

Good point. Because of control. It honestly doesn't matter what kind of camera I choose to use, as long as I can control the settings. I need to be able to control the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. I would like to be able to fire a flash. What don't I need? Megapixels, bells and whistles, the shiniest, newest thing. So, please don't tell me about your 50 megapixel cellphone camera with advanced facial recognition.

I hesitate to post this next part, but I think it fairly well underscores my point. Go ahead and google my camera body. Look up when it was first released, how many megapixels it has, and how much you can buy one for (used) these days.

Done? Yup, that's the camera I use for everything. Am I shooting billboards with it? Nope. Do I plan on upgrading in the future? You bet. But the point is that I can make beautiful images with that camera. I have studied and practiced technique, lighting, and composition. I have studied hundreds (if not thousands) of great photos. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but it takes a photographer to make an image, not a camera.

Quick & Easy Staging

An unstaged living room. Try not to trip on any toys.

The Food Network's Iron Chef may have "Kitchen Stadium", but here at Jon Barnes Photo we have "Living Room Laboratory." It's actually not as exciting as it sounds, but hey, I tried. Sorta.

Anyway, for our first interior photography experiment let's try some easy staging. Goodness knows what sort of mess you might find when going into someone's home to take real estate photographs. I've been pretty lucky so far, but almost every home you photograph is going to need some help (unless you are fortunate enough to be shooting a professionally staged home).

Enter my living room. It's actually not in horrible shape, but it does need a bit of attention. There are the obvious things, like the toys on the floor, the couch throws, and the droopy pillows.

But then there are the subtler things: The louvers of the plantation shutters are in various disarray, and the ceiling fixture is crooked (right now my wife is wondering why it took a blog post for me to get around to fixing that).

A little cleanup goes a long way.

It takes 2 or 3 minutes to straighten up small things like these, but it makes a big difference in the final photo. Now, we're not taking the room to a level worthy of a professional home stager or interior designer; however, we don't want to spend a long time on it. Remember, on a real estate shoot, we have a whole house to photograph in a short amount of time!

Usually, real estate agents will let the homeowner know to clean things up, and that certainly makes things easy. Regardless, it's not a bad idea to check with them beforehand, but there's bound to be a little work you'll have to do on your own. Take a few minutes and make it right.

The Great Wide-Angle Lens Debate

My wide-angle lens: the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 Pro DX II. 35mm equivalent: 16.5-24mm.

Wide-angle lenses are to real estate photography as baseball bats are to baseball. You can't really play the game without them. But how wide do you need to go?

I shudder and die a little bit inside whenever I hear someone refer to the need for a fisheye lens for real estate photography. Usually these people are not photographers (thankfully) and have no idea what a fisheye lens actually does (Google fisheye lens if you don't know). Rather, they are confusing the term fisheye with wide-angle. While a fisheye lens is a wide-angle lens, extreme distortion is one of its defining characteristics, and that is definitely not something you want to see in real estate photography.

Real estate photographers actually use rectilinear wide-angle lenses. Good rectilinear lenses keep straight lines straight, and even the slight distortion they produce can be easily corrected with post-processing software.

The problem with the majority of real estate photographs is not that they are being shot with fisheye lenses. It's that they are being photographed too wide.

Now, is this the fault of the photographer or the real estate agent?

A lot of the time, it's both. Many in the industry think that wider is better. Show everything that you can possibly show in the space and make it look bigger than it is. It's probably the latter that is the culprit most of the time, and I get it. Many buyers are looking for a spacious place to call home and a lot of the time, you don't actually have a spacious home that you are trying to sell. So, ultra wide-angle photographs create the illusion of a larger space, and you can at least get potential buyers in the door.

There are at least three problems with this, both for the agent and for the compositionally-conscious photographer. The first problem is that you may get your potential buyer in the door but once they see that the space looks nothing like the photo, they may be done. I know I've certainly felt that way in the past.

The second problem is for the photographer trying to create great work. Showing every single inch of the room is not only unnecessary, but it leads to a stagnant composition.

The third problem is more subtle, but something that you'll notice right away in the comparison photos below. The first photo was shot at at 35mm equivalent of 21mm (14mm on my DX sensor camera), while the second photo was shot at the equivalent of 27mm (18mm on DX). Look at the couch and closest window. In the first shot, the couch almost looks like it's falling out of the picture, while the window appears wider than it should.

Now, that isn't lens distortion that you're seeing. That is perspective distortion. The wider the lens, the closer you have to be to your subject to show what you need to show. What happens when you move closer is that objects closer to you appear much closer in comparison to objects further away from you. When you go really wide, that relationship becomes distorted in appearance, leading to the phenomenon you see when flipping between the two photos.

You may have noticed that my 21mm shot above didn't appear distorted until compared to the 27mm shot. But go wider and you'll start to really notice this effect. That's why I try to use the longest focal length I can get away with. I'm still shooting wide-angle, but I'm not just parking myself as close as possible and zooming my lens all the way out (the Tokina can go to 11mm, which is the 35mm equivalent of 16.5mm).

So, what's the solution? You're a photographer trying to get work in this industry, but the agents you work with want wide, wide, wide. Compromise. Look, 24mm is pretty wide. 20mm is quite wide. 16mm? Super wide, but why? It's too much most of the time and lends to distortion. Most of the really great interior photographers out there are shooting the majority of their work between 20mm and 24mm. Interior design photos are often shot with even longer focal lengths, although that comparison is unfair because that's a different industry.

I'm not saying there isn't a time to go ultra wide. There is, but it's not the bread and butter real estate shots. Ease off the wide zoom. Create tighter, more polished compositions. Show what needs to be shown, but make the space look appropriate and inviting. People will come.