I Thought Real Estate Photography Was Easy...

My favourite kind of photography. It's hard but when you got it right it's so satisfying. 1. You have to flash the room to combat the overexposure from the windows. It's a must 2. You can get good HDR but you need to do it manually in photoshop not auto HDR. Manually masking the highlight ad shadow part, there are some easy ways to do it. 3. SHOOT RAW! You need all the dynamic range in the world. Jpg doesn't have any dynamic range and wb corrections. 4. Tilt shift helps a ton, you don't need to correct the perspective and you can get "wider" photo by combining photos from shifting 5. For exterior i wait till sunset, beautiful sky and no harsh shadow

honestly, i am glad to hear some of this lol. makes me feel like i am not alone with self inflicted mistakes i can't avoid, especially the gear related narration.

With anything new, there is always a first. I am currently going on my 5th year as a RE photographer and have learned a ton in these past years; and I am still learning!! If you are wanting to continue to do RE photography, I would steer you to two photographers/YouTubers, Nathan Cool Photography and Rich Baum Photography for expert advice. They have loads of how to videos and with practice around your own home, your skill set will improve. My setup is very simple; Sony a73, Tamron 17-28, Flashpoint Evolve 200, Godox pro trigger and an off brand shutter release. The process I use does incorporate flash, however, I do use the in-built HDR on certain properties, but my default method is with blending ambient and flash. With practice I find it is way faster to shoot and edit and produces the best results. Best of luck to you, it is a fun and challenging genre of photography, but I love it!! You can also add in 360 imagery along with your knowledge of video to make yourself a true one stop shop!! Have fun!

My experience from 24 years of architecture photography: I photograph interiors with a focal length of 35mm (very large rooms) to 20mm (small rooms). In very rare exceptional cases, I have also photographed special perspectives with an 18mm or 16mm wide-angle lens, but only if this not results unrealistic caused distortions. Better several realistic detail photos than 1 unreal distorted extreme wide angle photo. This also applies to outdoor shots.

I am not an expert in real estate photography, but in situations where my lens isn't wide enough for the shots I want, I will take 2-4 overlapping shots of the scene and let Lightroom turn them into a panorama with very minimal effort on my part. Combine that with the transform tools in Lightroom to straighten the perspective lines to your liking and you might be able to pull these shots off with slightly tighter lenses.

Hello from Mexico, you have big technical problems to take the photos, first get a CPL filter to eliminate light glares that bounce off the floor, walls and where the light reflects, you also have to take the photos at F8 with the a6100 or at F11 with a sony a7, finally use an ipad with the cascable app so you don't have to manipulate the camera and you can correct the exposure from the ipad and to edit the photos correct, the color temperature, verticals and with layers you can select well exposed areas of the exterior and interior

As a former photojournalist those times I thought a job-gig would be easy they usually ended being the hard ones.

11:18 So moral of the story for me is. Check your gear before taking on any projects. Or even better regularly conduct maintenance tests on your gear so that you can avoid issues like this. I.e rotate through your whole lens selection and drones to check they still perform well. check for sensor dust on a monthly basis. Make a checklist of stuff you need before leaving the house. I.e. drone parts and other things

Im really glad you made this video. I am hoping to do some realestate photography over the summer and I'm now aware of some of the issues i may run into.

Thanks so much for linking my video, Arthur! Practice shots using your own house are always a great way to test things first-hand. In any case, it's almost always a trial and error process of finding what works best for each shooter as you noted.

First avoid extreme wide angle lenses. RE is usually shot between 17 and 24 mm on a full frame camera. Interior design photographers stick with a 24 mm to avoid distortion. While some photographers use HDR, I find it easier to use flash. Helps darken the interior lights and gets the correct color balance. In large rooms it may be necessary to light separate walls then blend in PS. It takes practice to produce good images and even after doing RE for 10 years I am still learning new techniques.

Good stuff: Excellent video! And it's interesting too. You're good on camera. A definite bonus! Now for the bad stuff. Your pics are blown out. Whites over exposed. Windows blown out. Shoot with bracketing. Don't shoot without a tripod. You need it to carefully compose shots and to make sure vertical and horizontal are even. NEVER shoot In jpg. RAW only. This give far greater flixibilty in editing. Get a decent flash. Cost is at least $200-$300. It will make a HUGE difference. It will also control color balance and temperatures. Then you can do brackets and flash all on tripod and then line up layers in Lightroom and Photoshop. Full frame is by far the best. More pixels to crop. More color density Two point perspective is more classy when done correctly. Lens choice. On full frame: 16mm to 24mm to 35mm primes or zooms. Making rooms look larger than life is dangerous. Then people walk in and think, "this place is smaller than I thought." But the pics make it look huge. Not good! I used to use Sony A7Rii with Canon 16mm and 24mm Tilt shift lenses. This limits distortion and yields amazing detail. Thank you and good night!

I am a complete amateur/hobbyist but I, too, did some real estate shoots as a favor to my realtor friend here in Austin. I watched countless hours of videos about bracketing and editing. It really is much, much, more difficult than it seems. The Rokinon 12mm paired with the a6100 actually did an amazing job and both houses sold within a few days of listing! Cheers to trying new stuff!

It's great that you took the time and effort to do the best job possible. There's nothing worse than doing a shoot, getting home, and finding out you had a mechanical issue that messed up all your shots. I agree with what another poster said about testing your setup at home before doing a job. I do this myself anytime I make a change to my system or take time off. It's so much easier to figure things out at home when no one is looking over your shoulder, or you are under pressure to get the job done in a certain amount of time. Here are a few things I wish I had known when I started. * 18mm at F8 on a full-frame camera or equivalent. This very accurately shows the true size of a room. Most people are not happy when they make the trip to look at a listing to find out the cavernous rooms are actually half as big as they looked in the photos. * As you mentioned, straight verticals. Gear head tripods make this extremely simple and fast. Anyone doing this for a living will save loads of time on-site and in post-processing. * Shoot RAW.. If for no other reason, it will give you more latitude to recover over-exposed and under-exposed shoots. After your home processing the pictures on your computer you will likely wish you could recover more than your jpg's have retained. * Flash.. From day one, pick a system like Godox or Flashpoint that are all battery-powered, and all part of the same ecosystem. Life is so much better when you can control all your flash from a single controller on your camera.. * Remote wireless triggers.. These are very cheap on Amazon. Much faster than using the timer. Gives you the ability to move around the room and add flash, or block light as needed. * Manuals. I keep manuals for all my flash and flash accessories in my camera bag. I use all this gear the exact same way every shoot. It's pretty easy to accidentally hit a button on the back of the flash controls and change a setting. If you haven't been through the shooting menus in a while, you may find it hard to get the settings back to where you need them. Ok, I'll stop before I get too far into the weeds. 🙂

Thank you for sharing this! Was thinking about offering help in this area to folks but it’s not as easy or straightforward.

Thanks for that video. Didn’t know what to expect from the video, but I learned a lot! I will test these things know to get more knowledge. Thanks!

One thing I learned with HDR and Jpegs in particular: They are a pain to color match. You can see that on your images. The light from outside is overexposed -> blown out white. When you add the HDR the camera darkens down the interior and thus lets in blue light. And then you have blue & purple spots. Not sure if you could fix them with a fixed white balance but this is the reason RAW is so much more forgiving. The color matching is easier. File size is crazy but it helps for these dedicated images. Thanks for showing us "the other side" of photography - especially a "quick helping hand" and how you HAVE to check everything and never assume everything will be fine. Cheers,

Nothing beats the 12-24mm GM for RE photography. That said, I would consider the Laowa 12mm f2.8. I bought the Canon EF version along with an adapter for my A7RIV, but I also got the Laowa Magic Shift Adapter (Canon EF to Sony FE) which has a great shift option for correcting perspective distortion in camera.

Congrats on over 200,000 subs - thx incredible - I like your "about tab" where you list your sub journey on youtube - it's a hidden gem of inspiration for me! This video is a great reminder that we are all human and there is joy in doing something we are not experts!!

Arthur thanks for the realty reality check from Austin (I'm here too!). I've been a Realtor in Austin for almost 40 years and have seen the practice of real estate photos go from NONE to one to now about 45 shots per MLS listing. I do all my own real estate photography and think I've started to get a good handle on the process. I would suggest that the "flambient" technique is the way to go. HDR works, but the colors and control you have with flash blended with natural light is the key. Also "window pops" come out soooo much better. There are definitely some tricks such as flashing back rooms, getting the angles right on window pops (you don't want to light up the window screen and lose the vibrancy of the exterior pics). I shoot with my Sony APS-C. I used the Laowa 9mm, but didn't have the sharpness I wanted. I use the newer Sony 10-20mm now (and the 10-18mm sits on the shelf). It gets wide, but at the 20mm side it is closer to "normal" for good exterior shots. The longer I do this the more I see the variability in technique to get the right shot. I'm not perfect, but I think get across good accurate representations of the property. Being the Realtor AND the photographer I think gives me some insight to visual marketing that some pros miss. You also want to make it realistic. When prospects come to see the property and the photos are actually better than the reality, that can cause disappointment and no sale. Love to buy you a lunch in Austin and talk about this more.