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
@@Archontasil I just graduated, can I shoot real estate photos with my A6000 with my stock lense? If not what lense would you recommend... I seen 11mm Prime.
@@yartriesthis i don't use sony cameras, but i think sony 10-18 would be wide enough and the zoom range would be good. i don't recommend prime as sometimes you would need to zoom in to crop certain unwanted areas/ better framing
"you have to flash the room" no, this looks very unrealistic and cold. it's always better to take photos with natural light and existing shadows, it looks realistic and comfortable. with a full frame sensor you don´t need HDR. a modern full frame sensor has enough dynamic range to lighten the shadows in lightroom.
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
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.
hello. happens that I want to try this on my own. what would you say on lens 17mm and tighter? I am worried that this wouldn't be wide enough for small rooms (especially toilets&showers). thank you!
@@IMadeInRussiaI indoor i use a zoom lens 16-35mm on a full frame camera. in very small rooms (bathrooms,...) i don´t go under 20mm, because this would look unrealistic distorted
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
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/UA-camrs, 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!
This. I was taught years ago (film days) that the best way to shoot RE interiors is to set your exposure to the outside light, then fill in with flash in the interior. The flash should not just be fill, but the same exposure as the outside. I imagine this is what's now called flambient. I also have a friend who was a high end RE photographer who always shot his exteriors at dusk with interior and exterior lights on. Very dramatic. Also, I would say that shooting raw would have given you a lot more leeway in correcting exposure issues. You might have better success with HDR with raw images.
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.
@@Primeros1000 it's really like 3 clicks. Mark the overlapping images, hit ctrl+M and select spherical, cylinder or perspective, depending on your needs and hit ok. Perfect shot, wide enough and no need for such wide lenses like laowa 9mm. +I always shoot 3 overlapping images in vertical mode next to each other for more vertical filed of view
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!
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,
Honestly I find comfort in your videos, even tho I don’t have a camera yet and I’m on a hectic challenging road to become a doctor I still wish I could be a photographer like you
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!
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.
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.
hello. happens that I want to try this on my own. what would you say on lens 17mm and tighter? I am worried that this wouldn't be wide enough for small rooms (especially toilets&showers). thank you!
Nathan Cool's youtube channel is loaded with great advice and techniques for shooting and editing. It is so difficult to aim for a high end result and be time efficient but it all gets better with experience. Still, each property is a new challenge with hopefully only issues you might have dealt with before but often new ones to flex the brain muscles. Gear helps but knowing how to use it is key, also knowing what images look good before you shoot is good so research is also advised as well as testing.
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.
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. 🙂
hello. happens that I want to try this on my own. what would you say on lens 17mm and tighter? I am worried that this wouldn't be wide enough for small rooms (especially toilets&showers). thank you!
@@IMadeInRussiaI It depends on the lens. My primary lens I shot is a Tamron 15-30mm. Many lenses start to show distortion after going wider then 18mm. My Tamron doesn't distort much, but enough that I can see it. I shoot many homes of all different sizes and pretty much never go wider than 18mm. Most bathrooms that are tiny, I just get a slice that shows the sink and mirror. Everyone knows there is a toilet out of frame, and I have never had a complaint about it. I have a 14mm zero distortion prime lens that I use for video. It would work fine really tight spaces. It is just not worth the time it would take to swap out lenses.
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.
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.
Real Estate is interesting because it looks easy on the surface, but you need so many exposures per room and a certain technique for blending them together. I watched many tutorials before trying it, and in the end I decided it wasn't for me. I am with you on wanting an APSC ultrawide! An 8-16mm would be amazing if physically and technically possible.
I shot one house for my friend as a favour. Sony a6300 with sigma 16mm. Focal lenght not wide enough but that's all I got so I had to made it work somehow. I even shot pano of one of the rooms 😅 Had great time doing that. HDR workflow is a little bit of a pain, but I shot Raw (always shoot raw for serious work) so the images came out nice. My friend digged them so that's all that matters. Also I shot video of the place and my camera started to overheat on me! So it wasn't all nice and easy, but we all learn from experience! Thanks for sharing your experience ;)
I'm glad someone has finally mentioned that we need an 8 or 9mm non-fisheye which is a dedicated aps-c lens, the Sigma 8-16 was never built in Sony e-mount and was discontinued some time ago (no news if it will even have a replacement or not). Sorry to hear that things went so poorly with your real estate photoshoot, I really hope that it doesn't put you off trying it again. I've gone out myself with camera and lenses only to find out that the battery was dead or that I'd left a particular lens at home...it happens to us all.
I’m a fairly new RE photographer with about a year and a half of experience and about 100 or so shoots total (I do this part time during weekends). Your final images are definitely better than my first ones by a lot. One of the best investments you can make is getting a decent tripod and a geared head. Being able to make those micro adjustments so you can get those lines straight will cut your workflow in half. It is not uncommon to make constant line adjustments during a shoot, because floors are rarely level from corner to corner of a home, or you’ll find yourself in situations where one of your tripod legs is on top of a baseboard or a thick area rug. Essential tool number two is a CPL filter. It will minimize harsh reflections off wooden floors and counter tops, and add some contrast as well. As for lens, it’s a common misconception that you should get the widest lens possible. Shooting a tiny bathroom at 12mm will make it look unrealistically big and can actually be a problem because it’s not a realistic image of how the bathroom actually looks. A 16-35mm is all you need about 99% of the time. You also don’t need a fast F2.8 lens, get a cheap prime like a Samyang 18mm F2.8 or a Zeiss 16-35 F4. You’ll be stopping down to f/8-10 so really, a fast lens is absolutely unnecessary. Essential tool number three is a remote trigger. I’ve seen hilarious videos of RE photographers trying to do the three second sprint out of a room and failing miserably. As for shooting technique, it’s quite clinical. Set that tripod at around light switch high, make sure that ball level is smack center and compose to show 3 walls. HDR settings just use 3 brackets 2ev apart. 5 brackets is overkill for most situations. And then when you’re ready, you’ll move up to flambient technique which is a completely different monster.
Welcome to my world! I'm a real estate agent as well and take most of my own photos. Flambient is the way to go - but it takes a loooooong time to process in post, but much better results. I use HDR in a pinch or on a really low price listing (or rental). I use the Sigma 14-24 that I picked up used for $800 - it's a GEM!! Also, you NEED to use a polarizer to get rid of those reflections on the floor.
OMG this echoes my first real estate shoot: bad window lighting, dust on the sensor (stopping down for focus is great but exposes ANY flaw) and not wide enough lens. I bought the Laowa for that reason. Works a charm.
Thanks for this! Which to add before the serous shoot at home/Studio where ever you have all your stuff... Check, check and recheck and while doing so take some test shoots and always do this! I'm used to shooting rockets from my front porch 100 miles from them.... So while Home and the shot are just 10 feet away.... I won't get another chance... That said for my other stuff I don't as much because I'll etehir be able to fix or let it go... That said great video and I'm glad your helping out your family and trying new things!
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!!
This was me when my work asked me to take headshots for several employees. Had a backdrop but no flash, high ISO had to be used, overall it didn’t turn out close to what I had envisioned but it was a learning experience. Good for you for trying new things.
Arthur - you don't need auto focus to shoot real estate interiors. Get a 12mm Rokinon (APS-C) lens . Set the focus ring just shy of infinity and tape it down. Shoot at f/8 or 7.1 and ISO 320. Shoot raw and stack the exposures in PS and hand blend them to make a really nice finished image.
While we normally do want the room/ space to look bigger, be careful not to go overboard.. If the shot looks too distorted, it will have the opposite effect; as in “this looks like a small room taken with a really wide angle lens”
Think one major issue of you trying to do HDR bracketing is 1. Doing it with jpegs, 2. Too many bracketed shots, the majority of the time a 3 shot +1, 0, -1 stop will work and then you have to blend the photos with masks in Photoshop. Lightroom won't do the greatest job when it comes to trying to blend in the areas of windows. Tips to do interior shots is to use an external flash and then move your flash around to the room to hide the glare from windows. You'll need to edit and mask them out in photoshop still, but I guess it just depends on how serious or demanding your client wants your photos to be and how much time you wanted to invest in the project.
Yep. Being a working pro, something goes wrong with every single gig. Every time. I have redundant backups, I check everything the night before and I data wrangle as fast as I can, and backup as fast as I can. Yes, being a pro means getting it right time and time again, in the face of adversity, and then doing it for a living. This is what separates a "pro". You come to realize that you have to find the thing in it, that keeps you coming back for more, and making a career at it. Most people can do a gig here or there and say they make a living....try doing it for a decade or more. Kudos for getting out there, and making something outside your comfort zone.
That Laowa! I'm using it with an FX30 now for my interior photos and video. I'm holding onto it forever lol. I did have that Samyang with my a7C, and liked it a lot.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Not easy to put your blunders out there for all to see. I have shot events, portraits, corporate, real estate, and interiors, products, advertising and more professionally for many years, that just means its been my main income, it doesn't mean I am super great, but feedback over the years is good to great, so my level in my region is quite high and I am always learning, still and always improving. Real estate I have shot for many years already and my techniques evolved over the years. Each property is a challenge. Time of day will affect photos greatly, colours from the green trees and grass outside will give colour casts, empty spaces are harder to shoot than furnished and decorated. I use a combo of flash and ambient to get the effect of daylight but with natural colours on the walls and surfaces. I also abandoned HDR long ago because of all the colour issues. Its still hard to do on site and in post. You need super wide yes, but not for every room, wide also distorts. I use a sigma 14-24 and am happy but sometimes I use my canon 17 TSE, shift and stitch for a really wide image, similar to a 11 or 12mm but with more ceiling, floor and width. Otherwise I use the 17TSE and shift to control the perpective and the distortion of close objects. I advise to test shoot, test edit, learn and repeat before doing a job for the first time, as it allows you to check you gear before the shoot, know what you need or whats missing, and deal with some issues before the shoot, but accept that its hard and you will need to adapt on site and take enough images to make post production give results you aimed for. Well done trying something new. I just did my first studio green screen portrait shoot. I tested, I edited, I dealt with the lighting and colour reflection issues and I was ready, and still had challenges on site due to client change of plan. The testing was vital. It went well with only some minor issues to fix in post. Problem solving is the job.
hello. happens that I want to try this on my own. what would you say on lens 17mm and tighter? I am worried that this wouldn't be wide enough for small rooms (especially toilets&showers). thank you!
@IMadeInRussiaI 17mm is sometimes not wide enough, but often you can find a shot with 16 or 17mm, however, tighter around 20mm, it really depends on the space and the angle you can find. I always keep my verticals straight,so 14mm or 17mm shift is great. I can usually find a shot with a plain 17mm but I can often find a better shot with 14mm. I don't have 12mm to compare but I have used the 17mm shifted and stitched panoramas of 3 images which is roughly 11mm. A life saver. That was only for the tightest spaces, like small bathroom, staircase or super small room. Get as wide as you can, you can always crop but composition skills help when space is against you.
Thank you for your experience. Fuji offers a 8 to 16mm F2.8. It is said, that this lense is very good for such shots and not thaaaat expensive overall compared to Sony Fullframe Lenses, such as the GM glass. I guess Sony should do so also. 😅
Thanks for sharing this story! It's interesting to see how a failed attempt at shooting a house led to the discovery of a great lens for real estate photography. The Sony 12-24mm F2.8 G Master sounds like an excellent investment and a bargain at only $45 for the weekend. I appreciate the speaker's dedication to learning the best approach for shooting real estate interiors and the helpful link to the UA-camr's hour-long video. It's great to see how the speaker's research paid off and resulted in better photos.
Excellent video!!! Excellent experience!!!! Thank you very much for sharing it with us because we can all learn from this stories.... Thank you and blessings!!!! 🙏
I love this video . This sort of thing happens to me when I try and help people out. Anyway, HDR has huge problems but with Enfuse you get much better blending results. Most Real Estate photographers don't admit it but for most shots you can simply expose for the window-view (if there is a window), or the brightest thing in the room, and cloak the room in flash, so that everything can be done with one single shot... if you bounce the flash and avoid shadows, you can do this in most cases and get great results. But, you know, in a funny way it's good to screw up and learn from it... I think that's the moral of the story; smart people learn much more from getting things wrong than getting things right.
😂😂😂 I do kitchens for a living and I’m a photographer. So I figured I could take my own pics. I had to take so many trips out there. I learned so much and it’s upped my game. I feel your pain bro
Great vid, takes alot to admit your "failures" . If anything, this was def a good dry run / test for any commercial shoot for all of us 😉And yes shoot RAW, it saves so much time in post. JPGs dont work with HDR at all (for me), you need 12+ bit depth. Additionaly if you dont have super wide lenses, i take (portrait) panoramas on a tripod with a 20-24-ish lens and splice them together in LR. This always works for me. No matter if it´s a tall building outside or room inside.... LR Panorama tools + LR Transform tab. Cheers!
I think it was a becki & chris video i watched, they come up with nice shooting of real estate photos. One key takeaway is that you need to over expose your photos. And know the direction of light. I am surprised why you didn't take that into consideration when you shoot the one with open windows where the lights are reflected to the floor.
I know you were working with the A7C but when you mentioned Laowa 9 you are talking APS-C so consider the Zeiss Touit 12mm F2.8. I have both and like both and that covers real estate pretty well. T'would be interesting to hear your thoughts on a new APS-C Sony. Also, I just had a lovely time in an exotic bird sanctuary in Colombia and loved the output of my Sony 70 - 350 which always exceeds my expectations. Bob Fleck
Even if you don't know how to take good photos, you're still an awesome lens reviewer and probably the best thing that has ever happened to Sony camera division 😅
Thanks for sharing your experience. Always good to improve your photography skills. You’ll probably learn a lot and be able to apply it to your around the house family photos.
Thanks for this. Found myself grinning,, recently i arrived on location earlier every one by 2hrs..then found out i have no memory card and no battery. Watching from Nairobi, Kenya.😀
As already said in the comments i presume, Always Shoot RAW for interiors. 3 shots with 0 and +1 or 2 and -1 or -2 bracket. From the corner, you don't need to shoot the walls that are to the left or right. The viewer's brain knows there's a wall there. Center the opposing corner and ensure the line is vertically level the best you can. Use a remote trigger or timer so as to not shake the camera at all. I set the camera up literally IN the corner as close as possible (camera usually about 3" from physically contacting both walls) and use my ipad as a remote viewer/trigger from outside the room. When the window light is exceptionally bright, you NEED a fill flash. and to lower your entire exposure bracket -1, -2 or even -3 stops. In lightroom, merge the HDR triplet into one. click for automatic lense profile correction. Click to auto align vertically. Take highlights all the way to zero, lowlights all the way to max, creating what is essentially a pretty flat image. Increase Saturation and other color enhancements up to style preference.
I also have a Rokinon lens and a plastic element on the rear gets unscrewed by itself from time to time but it has nothing to do with the quality of photos, you can screw it back. The problems of your photos are bad lighting, bad post-processing and maybe bad camera settings.
I would definitely shoot in Raw, especially since you are bracketing and now a days sd cards are cheap. You can always export in a lower resolution. I have never used auto focus for real estate, but focus assist is awesome and I also shoot from f4-f8 depending on the situation. If you get more into real estate photography mixing Flash and Natural lighting will give you more professional results and works very well with window pulls.
I recently went to a client's corporate building. It's massive 100,000+ SF and I shot 500 photos. Half were in JPG and the others were RAW. This wasn't for selling the building but for a massive design project I am working on. Because everyone else in my team only had phones, I decided to bring my Sony a6300 with the Sigma 16mm f1.4. It ended up working perfectly for most of the shots, but then again these were office suites which were quite large already. I thought JPG would be fine for the project we were working on. Nope! There were waaaay too many color aberrations, poor color reproduction, etc. I opened all the RAW files I also took just in case, and BOOM! They looked almost perfect out of the box with some minor adjustments to highlighting overall. I was really happy with my photos but I can see where I'm going to need a much wider lens for shooting homes. I am wanting to try real estate photography, and have been following three people... Eli Jones (he shoots quick and simple, takes a simple business approach, and farms out all of his editing), Taylor Brown (an exceptional RE photographer with amazing tuts), and Inside Real Estate Photography (much more detailed tuts who also does primarily flambient)
Great video Arthur. I've never considered this sort of photography before but had at times wondered how such photos were made achieving good lighting and colour. So much to learn, so I'd like to try a bit for my own interest. Some great suggestions in the comments too and have just watched a bunch of Nathan Cool Photo videos on the flambient and other techniques he uses.
I went and had a go at the flambient technique today in one room and it works a treat. Also did a window pull and edited the exported files from Capture One after basic exposure adjustments as 16bit TIFF files in GIMP. Used a 12mm Samyang manual lens on my Sony a6600 at f8 with remote trigger and an on camera Godox TT350S flash with diffuser on sturdy tripod at waist height leveling camera to get straight lines of the walls. It would work much better if I could have a better/stronger off camera flash to eliminate shows and flash reflections something like the Godox AD200Pro. So edit I did was three images, ambient, flash bounce off ceiling, flash directed at windows. Then edit in GIMP as layers, base image is flash bounce off ceiling, ambient is globally blended, luminance less than 50% opacity, window pull edited with selective mask for the outdoor scene with darken blend mode.
I’m just a hobby photographer but I had tried using a speed light and exposing for the windows and I had been really happy with the results, I have not try braketting but seems like a good challenge
Yes the big one is the exposure of the windows in comparision with the rest of the interiors. I was suprised you took jpgs. Have you tried Viewpoint perspective control software by DXO. It is very good. It may even be available as a plug in for Lightroom. It saves you from requiring a shift lens. I am not that great with interiors either. I could do with some lessons on that too. A good video though. Thanks for sharing. I will check out Sarah Wagners tips for Nathan Cool photography and Rich Baum Photography. Sounds good. I have found Samyangs 12mm f2 manual focus lens to be quite good for interiors.
A question for you Arthur, since you tried both the setups: Would you suggest (for indoors but also for wide panorama scenarios) to go with A7iii+ samyang 14 2.8 AF or A6500+ laowa 9 2.8? In terms of sharpness overall, what you think it's better? Because if the samyang has AF and is quite "cheap", on the other hand you have to spend money on it for the square filter since you can't mount regular round filters on it. While the laowa does not have AF, and costs more, and on aps-c kinda sucks at low iso. Overall what should i go for? Thanks in advice
I have considered doing some real estate work but not done it yet. Did you consider or do any of your cameras have built in panorama setting? One of my Nikon APSc models, D3300, has a panorama setting I just haven't used it yet. I think one or two of my other cameras also have that either M43 or maybe my Nikon FF but not sure yet.
Arthur, your video about the Laowa 9mm in the past is what made me buy that lens, and Real Estate photo/video is one of my primary niche's. Though that lens has done a great job maximizing the capture space...the vignetting is a problem, and there's just something about that lens that doesn't even out perform the pancake 16mm 2.8. For RE photo/video I've come to the conclusion that the only real way to go is to go full frame here. It's the only niche that I now feel is a must for full frame. Unless you're shooting agents talking head. Oh yea...my ND filter got stuck on my Laowa 9mm, so now everything is always too dark. $500 wasted.
A) you don#t need to touch the sensor to clean it, just use a rocket blower. Advantage to your approach: if the dust is smeary, you remove th dust and leave a smear mark on the sensor. Next step then is to use cleaning fluid, which is a mee. B) There is zero argument against always shooting JPG+RAW. You can repair much more and usually don't need HDR if you are using RAW. C) If your lens is not wide enough, shoot multiple pictures with fixed exposure and composite with free Image Composite Editor ICE from Microsoft
Moral of the story: Check your glass before you put it on (speaking from experience, multiple times) and always shoot raw if HDR matters ... not because of color. RAW is about light and in real estate, light is everything.
With the gear you showed you are almost complete and I think you did well considering this being your first time. I'll add a flash which always comes handy in order to cover areas with too much shadow and raw shoots may help as well. About the drone, remember that "legally" and under FAA regulation you need to have the commercial drone license (part 107) in order to do anything than recreational flights. Real Estate is considered commercial type flights even if you're doing a favor to yourself and you are using an under 249g drone like the DJI Mini. I'll pursue to certification if you feel you will be using drone pictures or videos in the near future or even to show them in your youtube channel... oh yes, this is considered commercial as well. I liked the way you presented the contents and ideas. Good luck!
Mostly a case of "everybody has a bad day" - or two. I don't know how these images were to be presented, but most real estate shots are framed around emphasizing space and minimizing flaws; the people looking at them generally wouldn't notice, or at least not care about, dust artifacts or lighting issues. To that end the most difficult bit is trying to even out exposure when there's light coming in windows and pouring out fixtures; you can try all you like with HDR but nothing beats illuminating the scene from the POV of the camera to calm down the dynamic range. Really you didn't do bad for a first attempt, save the equipment issues which can get anyone.
Something similar happened to me and I needed the photos urgently. Ended up using iPhone in manual mode and some quick edits. Was way easier and better than my a6000 + sigma 16mm tries
Having shot over 300 houses for the past 3 years I know how to shoot and what angles to look for. Lens wise you only need 16-35 f4 lens for full frame and 10-18 f4 lens for the crop body. I would say 98 percent of the time you use these lens. You can get away with wide angle prime lens for the interior. But for thr facade it is better to us zoom lens to create that compressed look that sells the house. One of the top selling Agents I work with always want that shot.
This is wonderful. I am a full time real estate photographer. I appreciate your effort. Real estate photography is a wonderful art. Time, patience, effort, eventual mastery. Keep it up. I have some amazing editors if you want those images completed to a professional level for a fair price. Let me know.
This story begins as do all stories begin which are in our life to humble us, to teach us, and allow us to grow. "... with a simple favor I was going to do..." and "easy, not a problem..."
I am not sure you can do bracketing hdr with 8 bit jpeg. You need 12 or 14 bit raw. Also, you must have the same color temp for all bracketing shots. That is why yours came purple, I guess.
Moral of the story: just shoot the whole thing on iPhone 😅 The ultra wide is 13mm equivalent, you can shoot raw or HDR and you can fit it super close to the walls. And since the sensor is small, no need to stop down for depth of field. I’m not a professional, but for the few listings I’ve shot, I’d say it’s perfect for the job.
I have a shot couple properties with kit lens 16-55mm with a6400. No issues. Yea might not be wide enough, but it got the job done. For what I was being paid it was plenty enough. Flash? No Learned quickly online that it's a minor difference to realtors shooting with flash vs hdr. Shot with hdr, raw, combined everything in lightroom, edited it all up quick with no issues
@ArthurR that is really weird to why you would have the bracketing issues. I got away with 3 Brackets, 5 should cover it no issues. 3 bracket with 1 stop between. I think its because of shooting in JPEG, because then you have literally no flexibility in post editing. I've tried editing jpeg and you have like maybe 20% flexibility of what raw has.
One thing I notice about real estate photography is it's intentionally misleading and mostly useless e.g. almost always super wide angle shots, even wider than most cellphone cameras, and none of the shots give you any useful information to determine the plan, so you're forced to go see the property if they don't include one in the listing. Real estate photography is just another marketing tool in the end, and it's about as dishonest as it gets. I feels like it's the antithesis to photography, which imho, should - outside artistic use cases - capture reality as closely as possible.
Excellent real estate photography does not mislead. It enhances and makes things look beautiful. Using super wide angle lenses is a bad idea.Too much distortion and it misleads viewers into perceiving size.
Two real estate photographers to learn from: Nathan Cool, and Mike Kelley. I think both would agree that you really need to use Photoshop (or in my case I use Affinity Photo) so that you can use layers and mask windows, skylights, etc. Lightroom HDR just won’t cut it.
Yes you want the room to look spacious but you don’t want it to look unrealistic… with that said I’ve never shot anything wider than 16mm full frame. A powerful flash is more important than anything in real estate photos. I’m not a fan of HDR either because most camera/software don’t do a good job and usually ended up with weird patterns. A flash-ambient blend gives me much more control. Also, SHOOT RAW! The contact between the interior and exterior is way too much fora jpeg to handle.
Iphone ultrawide is 13mm equivalent. I used both real camera and the smartphones when I sold my house. Sometimes the iphone is better. Especially its smart HDR and super sharpened look actually works great for real estate. and the other thing I learned was some of these "professional" photography has no clue what they are doing.
![Exposing My Real Estate Photography Workflow 🤯 [So you can copy it]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/J0X0k09R2rY/mqdefault.jpg)
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
Good tips, this is echoing some of the other comments. What kind of tilt shift lens do you use for this?
@@ArthurR used to rent canon 24mm shift, but I'm gonna buy samyang/rokinon 24mm, canon ones are too expensive
@@Archontasil I just graduated, can I shoot real estate photos with my A6000 with my stock lense? If not what lense would you recommend... I seen 11mm Prime.
@@yartriesthis i don't use sony cameras, but i think sony 10-18 would be wide enough and the zoom range would be good. i don't recommend prime as sometimes you would need to zoom in to crop certain unwanted areas/ better framing
"you have to flash the room" no, this looks very unrealistic and cold. it's always better to take photos with natural light and existing shadows, it looks realistic and comfortable. with a full frame sensor you don´t need HDR. a modern full frame sensor has enough dynamic range to lighten the shadows in lightroom.
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
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.
hello. happens that I want to try this on my own. what would you say on lens 17mm and tighter? I am worried that this wouldn't be wide enough for small rooms (especially toilets&showers). thank you!
@@IMadeInRussiaI indoor i use a zoom lens 16-35mm on a full frame camera. in very small rooms (bathrooms,...) i don´t go under 20mm, because this would look unrealistic distorted
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
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/UA-camrs, 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!
That's awesome feedback, thank you. Surprised that 17mm is enough! But it sounds like I should try this flambient approach next time.
This. I was taught years ago (film days) that the best way to shoot RE interiors is to set your exposure to the outside light, then fill in with flash in the interior. The flash should not just be fill, but the same exposure as the outside. I imagine this is what's now called flambient.
I also have a friend who was a high end RE photographer who always shot his exteriors at dusk with interior and exterior lights on. Very dramatic.
Also, I would say that shooting raw would have given you a lot more leeway in correcting exposure issues. You might have better success with HDR with raw images.
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.
I have heard of this but have not tried it. Mmm 🤔
@@Primeros1000 it's really like 3 clicks. Mark the overlapping images, hit ctrl+M and select spherical, cylinder or perspective, depending on your needs and hit ok. Perfect shot, wide enough and no need for such wide lenses like laowa 9mm.
+I always shoot 3 overlapping images in vertical mode next to each other for more vertical filed of view
That is actually better than super wide, which looks very distorted in a tight bathroom
I need a course on LR and specifically on iPad. I simply don’t understand how to combine photos for hdr or making a panorama.
But then u can't do HDR. And I guess the lines might be crooked. U can't check it in advance...
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!
As a former photojournalist those times I thought a job-gig would be easy they usually ended being the hard ones.
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,
Honestly I find comfort in your videos, even tho I don’t have a camera yet and I’m on a hectic challenging road to become a doctor I still wish I could be a photographer like you
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!
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.
I’ve been looking for this comment. Good to know you use APSC and that lens.
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.
hello. happens that I want to try this on my own. what would you say on lens 17mm and tighter? I am worried that this wouldn't be wide enough for small rooms (especially toilets&showers). thank you!
Nathan Cool's youtube channel is loaded with great advice and techniques for shooting and editing. It is so difficult to aim for a high end result and be time efficient but it all gets better with experience. Still, each property is a new challenge with hopefully only issues you might have dealt with before but often new ones to flex the brain muscles. Gear helps but knowing how to use it is key, also knowing what images look good before you shoot is good so research is also advised as well as testing.
I ve been watching yo video for years ,its so fun lol
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.
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. 🙂
hello. happens that I want to try this on my own. what would you say on lens 17mm and tighter? I am worried that this wouldn't be wide enough for small rooms (especially toilets&showers). thank you!
@@IMadeInRussiaI It depends on the lens. My primary lens I shot is a Tamron 15-30mm. Many lenses start to show distortion after going wider then 18mm. My Tamron doesn't distort much, but enough that I can see it. I shoot many homes of all different sizes and pretty much never go wider than 18mm. Most bathrooms that are tiny, I just get a slice that shows the sink and mirror. Everyone knows there is a toilet out of frame, and I have never had a complaint about it.
I have a 14mm zero distortion prime lens that I use for video. It would work fine really tight spaces. It is just not worth the time it would take to swap out lenses.
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!
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.
Canon 16mm and 24mm tilt shift beats a Sony zoom any day. But the Canon's are expensive. They work great on Sony A7RII as well.
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.
Real Estate is interesting because it looks easy on the surface, but you need so many exposures per room and a certain technique for blending them together. I watched many tutorials before trying it, and in the end I decided it wasn't for me.
I am with you on wanting an APSC ultrawide! An 8-16mm would be amazing if physically and technically possible.
I shot one house for my friend as a favour. Sony a6300 with sigma 16mm. Focal lenght not wide enough but that's all I got so I had to made it work somehow. I even shot pano of one of the rooms 😅
Had great time doing that. HDR workflow is a little bit of a pain, but I shot Raw (always shoot raw for serious work) so the images came out nice. My friend digged them so that's all that matters.
Also I shot video of the place and my camera started to overheat on me!
So it wasn't all nice and easy, but we all learn from experience! Thanks for sharing your experience ;)
I'm glad someone has finally mentioned that we need an 8 or 9mm non-fisheye which is a dedicated aps-c lens, the Sigma 8-16 was never built in Sony e-mount and was discontinued some time ago (no news if it will even have a replacement or not). Sorry to hear that things went so poorly with your real estate photoshoot, I really hope that it doesn't put you off trying it again. I've gone out myself with camera and lenses only to find out that the battery was dead or that I'd left a particular lens at home...it happens to us all.
I’m a fairly new RE photographer with about a year and a half of experience and about 100 or so shoots total (I do this part time during weekends). Your final images are definitely better than my first ones by a lot. One of the best investments you can make is getting a decent tripod and a geared head. Being able to make those micro adjustments so you can get those lines straight will cut your workflow in half. It is not uncommon to make constant line adjustments during a shoot, because floors are rarely level from corner to corner of a home, or you’ll find yourself in situations where one of your tripod legs is on top of a baseboard or a thick area rug. Essential tool number two is a CPL filter. It will minimize harsh reflections off wooden floors and counter tops, and add some contrast as well. As for lens, it’s a common misconception that you should get the widest lens possible. Shooting a tiny bathroom at 12mm will make it look unrealistically big and can actually be a problem because it’s not a realistic image of how the bathroom actually looks. A 16-35mm is all you need about 99% of the time. You also don’t need a fast F2.8 lens, get a cheap prime like a Samyang 18mm F2.8 or a Zeiss 16-35 F4. You’ll be stopping down to f/8-10 so really, a fast lens is absolutely unnecessary. Essential tool number three is a remote trigger. I’ve seen hilarious videos of RE photographers trying to do the three second sprint out of a room and failing miserably.
As for shooting technique, it’s quite clinical. Set that tripod at around light switch high, make sure that ball level is smack center and compose to show 3 walls. HDR settings just use 3 brackets 2ev apart. 5 brackets is overkill for most situations. And then when you’re ready, you’ll move up to flambient technique which is a completely different monster.
Welcome to my world! I'm a real estate agent as well and take most of my own photos. Flambient is the way to go - but it takes a loooooong time to process in post, but much better results. I use HDR in a pinch or on a really low price listing (or rental). I use the Sigma 14-24 that I picked up used for $800 - it's a GEM!! Also, you NEED to use a polarizer to get rid of those reflections on the floor.
Polarizer! That plus a little playing around with exposure would have helped. But I’m going to try flambient next time.
@@ArthurR What is flambient?
Wish I knew about the polarizer trick when I sold my house.
OMG this echoes my first real estate shoot: bad window lighting, dust on the sensor (stopping down for focus is great but exposes ANY flaw) and not wide enough lens. I bought the Laowa for that reason. Works a charm.
Thanks for this! Which to add before the serous shoot at home/Studio where ever you have all your stuff... Check, check and recheck and while doing so take some test shoots and always do this! I'm used to shooting rockets from my front porch 100 miles from them.... So while Home and the shot are just 10 feet away.... I won't get another chance... That said for my other stuff I don't as much because I'll etehir be able to fix or let it go... That said great video and I'm glad your helping out your family and trying new things!
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!!
This was me when my work asked me to take headshots for several employees. Had a backdrop but no flash, high ISO had to be used, overall it didn’t turn out close to what I had envisioned but it was a learning experience. Good for you for trying new things.
Arthur - you don't need auto focus to shoot real estate interiors. Get a 12mm Rokinon (APS-C) lens . Set the focus ring just shy of infinity and tape it down. Shoot at f/8 or 7.1 and ISO 320. Shoot raw and stack the exposures in PS and hand blend them to make a really nice finished image.
While we normally do want the room/ space to look bigger, be careful not to go overboard.. If the shot looks too distorted, it will have the opposite effect; as in “this looks like a small room taken with a really wide angle lens”
This 😂
Thank you for sharing this part of your journey
Arthur you’re such an inspiration! Great video!
Good and interesting video as always,Arthur. Your houses are HUGE! Cheers from Europe.
Thank you for sharing this! Was thinking about offering help in this area to folks but it’s not as easy or straightforward.
I use the rokinon 14mm f2.8 for real estate photography. I’ve done over 150 properties and have had zero issues.
You should look into flambient if you ever wnat to do this again, really helps with color casts 🤙
Ive heard this - a bit more advanced but the results do look much better.
Think one major issue of you trying to do HDR bracketing is 1. Doing it with jpegs, 2. Too many bracketed shots, the majority of the time a 3 shot +1, 0, -1 stop will work and then you have to blend the photos with masks in Photoshop. Lightroom won't do the greatest job when it comes to trying to blend in the areas of windows.
Tips to do interior shots is to use an external flash and then move your flash around to the room to hide the glare from windows. You'll need to edit and mask them out in photoshop still, but I guess it just depends on how serious or demanding your client wants your photos to be and how much time you wanted to invest in the project.
Yep. Being a working pro, something goes wrong with every single gig. Every time. I have redundant backups, I check everything the night before and I data wrangle as fast as I can, and backup as fast as I can. Yes, being a pro means getting it right time and time again, in the face of adversity, and then doing it for a living. This is what separates a "pro". You come to realize that you have to find the thing in it, that keeps you coming back for more, and making a career at it. Most people can do a gig here or there and say they make a living....try doing it for a decade or more. Kudos for getting out there, and making something outside your comfort zone.
That Laowa! I'm using it with an FX30 now for my interior photos and video. I'm holding onto it forever lol. I did have that Samyang with my a7C, and liked it a lot.
It took me almost 2 years to learn to finish a 4 bedrooms house shoot in 35mins and producing 14 images for listing. And I am still learning.
Cool.Thank you
Thanks for sharing your experience. Not easy to put your blunders out there for all to see. I have shot events, portraits, corporate, real estate, and interiors, products, advertising and more professionally for many years, that just means its been my main income, it doesn't mean I am super great, but feedback over the years is good to great, so my level in my region is quite high and I am always learning, still and always improving. Real estate I have shot for many years already and my techniques evolved over the years. Each property is a challenge. Time of day will affect photos greatly, colours from the green trees and grass outside will give colour casts, empty spaces are harder to shoot than furnished and decorated. I use a combo of flash and ambient to get the effect of daylight but with natural colours on the walls and surfaces. I also abandoned HDR long ago because of all the colour issues. Its still hard to do on site and in post. You need super wide yes, but not for every room, wide also distorts. I use a sigma 14-24 and am happy but sometimes I use my canon 17 TSE, shift and stitch for a really wide image, similar to a 11 or 12mm but with more ceiling, floor and width. Otherwise I use the 17TSE and shift to control the perpective and the distortion of close objects. I advise to test shoot, test edit, learn and repeat before doing a job for the first time, as it allows you to check you gear before the shoot, know what you need or whats missing, and deal with some issues before the shoot, but accept that its hard and you will need to adapt on site and take enough images to make post production give results you aimed for. Well done trying something new. I just did my first studio green screen portrait shoot. I tested, I edited, I dealt with the lighting and colour reflection issues and I was ready, and still had challenges on site due to client change of plan. The testing was vital. It went well with only some minor issues to fix in post. Problem solving is the job.
hello. happens that I want to try this on my own. what would you say on lens 17mm and tighter? I am worried that this wouldn't be wide enough for small rooms (especially toilets&showers). thank you!
@IMadeInRussiaI 17mm is sometimes not wide enough, but often you can find a shot with 16 or 17mm, however, tighter around 20mm, it really depends on the space and the angle you can find. I always keep my verticals straight,so 14mm or 17mm shift is great. I can usually find a shot with a plain 17mm but I can often find a better shot with 14mm. I don't have 12mm to compare but I have used the 17mm shifted and stitched panoramas of 3 images which is roughly 11mm. A life saver. That was only for the tightest spaces, like small bathroom, staircase or super small room. Get as wide as you can, you can always crop but composition skills help when space is against you.
Thank you for your experience. Fuji offers a 8 to 16mm F2.8. It is said, that this lense is very good for such shots and not thaaaat expensive overall compared to Sony Fullframe Lenses, such as the GM glass. I guess Sony should do so also. 😅
Thanks for sharing this story! It's interesting to see how a failed attempt at shooting a house led to the discovery of a great lens for real estate photography. The Sony 12-24mm F2.8 G Master sounds like an excellent investment and a bargain at only $45 for the weekend. I appreciate the speaker's dedication to learning the best approach for shooting real estate interiors and the helpful link to the UA-camr's hour-long video. It's great to see how the speaker's research paid off and resulted in better photos.
Great video format and honest experience share. You could do more of these videos, it is very relatable.
Excellent video!!! Excellent experience!!!! Thank you very much for sharing it with us because we can all learn from this stories.... Thank you and blessings!!!! 🙏
Great video. Funny and honest with some good pointers.
Lol that thumbnail is gold
I love this video . This sort of thing happens to me when I try and help people out. Anyway, HDR has huge problems but with Enfuse you get much better blending results. Most Real Estate photographers don't admit it but for most shots you can simply expose for the window-view (if there is a window), or the brightest thing in the room, and cloak the room in flash, so that everything can be done with one single shot... if you bounce the flash and avoid shadows, you can do this in most cases and get great results.
But, you know, in a funny way it's good to screw up and learn from it... I think that's the moral of the story; smart people learn much more from getting things wrong than getting things right.
😂😂😂 I do kitchens for a living and I’m a photographer. So I figured I could take my own pics. I had to take so many trips out there. I learned so much and it’s upped my game. I feel your pain bro
Great vid, takes alot to admit your "failures" . If anything, this was def a good dry run / test for any commercial shoot for all of us 😉And yes shoot RAW, it saves so much time in post. JPGs dont work with HDR at all (for me), you need 12+ bit depth. Additionaly if you dont have super wide lenses, i take (portrait) panoramas on a tripod with a 20-24-ish lens and splice them together in LR. This always works for me. No matter if it´s a tall building outside or room inside.... LR Panorama tools + LR Transform tab. Cheers!
I think it was a becki & chris video i watched, they come up with nice shooting of real estate photos. One key takeaway is that you need to over expose your photos. And know the direction of light. I am surprised why you didn't take that into consideration when you shoot the one with open windows where the lights are reflected to the floor.
When shooting indoors, better to underexpose than to overexpose. Can always bring the shadows up in post.
I know you were working with the A7C but when you mentioned Laowa 9 you are talking APS-C so consider the Zeiss Touit 12mm F2.8. I have both and like both and that covers real estate pretty well. T'would be interesting to hear your thoughts on a new APS-C Sony. Also, I just had a lovely time in an exotic bird sanctuary in Colombia and loved the output of my Sony 70 - 350 which always exceeds my expectations. Bob Fleck
Even if you don't know how to take good photos, you're still an awesome lens reviewer and probably the best thing that has ever happened to Sony camera division 😅
Thanks for sharing your experience. Always good to improve your photography skills. You’ll probably learn a lot and be able to apply it to your around the house family photos.
Canon and Nikon made a series of tilt and shift lens that allow you to correct the perspective
Cool video, and it will certainly make me think twice if someone asks me to do some real estate photography for them.
isnt the laowa 12mm zero-d full frame aswell?
the 9mm is for aps-c but crazy wide
Thanks for this. Found myself grinning,, recently i arrived on location earlier every one by 2hrs..then found out i have no memory card and no battery. Watching from Nairobi, Kenya.😀
Noooooo! Hahahaha that’s the worst.
As already said in the comments i presume, Always Shoot RAW for interiors. 3 shots with 0 and +1 or 2 and -1 or -2 bracket. From the corner, you don't need to shoot the walls that are to the left or right. The viewer's brain knows there's a wall there. Center the opposing corner and ensure the line is vertically level the best you can. Use a remote trigger or timer so as to not shake the camera at all. I set the camera up literally IN the corner as close as possible (camera usually about 3" from physically contacting both walls) and use my ipad as a remote viewer/trigger from outside the room.
When the window light is exceptionally bright, you NEED a fill flash. and to lower your entire exposure bracket -1, -2 or even -3 stops.
In lightroom, merge the HDR triplet into one. click for automatic lense profile correction. Click to auto align vertically.
Take highlights all the way to zero, lowlights all the way to max, creating what is essentially a pretty flat image.
Increase Saturation and other color enhancements up to style preference.
I also have a Rokinon lens and a plastic element on the rear gets unscrewed by itself from time to time but it has nothing to do with the quality of photos, you can screw it back. The problems of your photos are bad lighting, bad post-processing and maybe bad camera settings.
Great share! I think we all learned alot.
I would definitely shoot in Raw, especially since you are bracketing and now a days sd cards are cheap. You can always export in a lower resolution. I have never used auto focus for real estate, but focus assist is awesome and I also shoot from f4-f8 depending on the situation. If you get more into real estate photography mixing Flash and Natural lighting will give you more professional results and works very well with window pulls.
Sony FE 12-24mm f2.8 gm or the f4 g are best options
I recently went to a client's corporate building. It's massive 100,000+ SF and I shot 500 photos. Half were in JPG and the others were RAW. This wasn't for selling the building but for a massive design project I am working on.
Because everyone else in my team only had phones, I decided to bring my Sony a6300 with the Sigma 16mm f1.4. It ended up working perfectly for most of the shots, but then again these were office suites which were quite large already.
I thought JPG would be fine for the project we were working on. Nope! There were waaaay too many color aberrations, poor color reproduction, etc. I opened all the RAW files I also took just in case, and BOOM! They looked almost perfect out of the box with some minor adjustments to highlighting overall.
I was really happy with my photos but I can see where I'm going to need a much wider lens for shooting homes. I am wanting to try real estate photography, and have been following three people... Eli Jones (he shoots quick and simple, takes a simple business approach, and farms out all of his editing), Taylor Brown (an exceptional RE photographer with amazing tuts), and Inside Real Estate Photography (much more detailed tuts who also does primarily flambient)
I use the laowa 15mm shift lens and the 10mm voigtlaender on my A1.
Some of us appreciate vulnerability. Mistakes makes for better teaching. I followed your channel to learn. Keep it up but i think you knpw that
Great video Arthur. I've never considered this sort of photography before but had at times wondered how such photos were made achieving good lighting and colour. So much to learn, so I'd like to try a bit for my own interest. Some great suggestions in the comments too and have just watched a bunch of Nathan Cool Photo videos on the flambient and other techniques he uses.
I went and had a go at the flambient technique today in one room and it works a treat. Also did a window pull and edited the exported files from Capture One after basic exposure adjustments as 16bit TIFF files in GIMP. Used a 12mm Samyang manual lens on my Sony a6600 at f8 with remote trigger and an on camera Godox TT350S flash with diffuser on sturdy tripod at waist height leveling camera to get straight lines of the walls. It would work much better if I could have a better/stronger off camera flash to eliminate shows and flash reflections something like the Godox AD200Pro. So edit I did was three images, ambient, flash bounce off ceiling, flash directed at windows. Then edit in GIMP as layers, base image is flash bounce off ceiling, ambient is globally blended, luminance less than 50% opacity, window pull edited with selective mask for the outdoor scene with darken blend mode.
I work in the real estate photography sector. You should NEVER use JPG's to make an HDR. I recognize the results you got from doing that.
As soon as I saw the “final product” in Lightroom, I knew I messed up by not shooting raw.
I’m just a hobby photographer but I had tried using a speed light and exposing for the windows and I had been really happy with the results, I have not try braketting but seems like a good challenge
I’ve shot real estate for the last 15 years and I’ve done well with a 16-35mm range. But real estate can be tricky
You did ok for your 1st time 👏👏👏👏
Yes the big one is the exposure of the windows in comparision with the rest of the interiors. I was suprised you took jpgs. Have you tried Viewpoint perspective control software by DXO. It is very good. It may even be available as a plug in for Lightroom. It saves you from requiring a shift lens. I am not that great with interiors either. I could do with some lessons on that too. A good video though. Thanks for sharing. I will check out Sarah Wagners tips for Nathan Cool photography and Rich Baum Photography. Sounds good. I have found Samyangs 12mm f2 manual focus lens to be quite good for interiors.
A question for you Arthur, since you tried both the setups: Would you suggest (for indoors but also for wide panorama scenarios) to go with A7iii+ samyang 14 2.8 AF or A6500+ laowa 9 2.8?
In terms of sharpness overall, what you think it's better?
Because if the samyang has AF and is quite "cheap", on the other hand you have to spend money on it for the square filter since you can't mount regular round filters on it.
While the laowa does not have AF, and costs more, and on aps-c kinda sucks at low iso.
Overall what should i go for? Thanks in advice
I have considered doing some real estate work but not done it yet. Did you consider or do any of your cameras have built in panorama setting? One of my Nikon APSc models, D3300, has a panorama setting I just haven't used it yet. I think one or two of my other cameras also have that either M43 or maybe my Nikon FF but not sure yet.
Arthur, your video about the Laowa 9mm in the past is what made me buy that lens, and Real Estate photo/video is one of my primary niche's. Though that lens has done a great job maximizing the capture space...the vignetting is a problem, and there's just something about that lens that doesn't even out perform the pancake 16mm 2.8. For RE photo/video I've come to the conclusion that the only real way to go is to go full frame here. It's the only niche that I now feel is a must for full frame. Unless you're shooting agents talking head. Oh yea...my ND filter got stuck on my Laowa 9mm, so now everything is always too dark. $500 wasted.
You not have the Sony 10-18mm F/4 ASPC still ?
A) you don#t need to touch the sensor to clean it, just use a rocket blower. Advantage to your approach: if the dust is smeary, you remove th dust and leave a smear mark on the sensor. Next step then is to use cleaning fluid, which is a mee.
B) There is zero argument against always shooting JPG+RAW. You can repair much more and usually don't need HDR if you are using RAW.
C) If your lens is not wide enough, shoot multiple pictures with fixed exposure and composite with free Image Composite Editor ICE from Microsoft
Moral of the story: Check your glass before you put it on (speaking from experience, multiple times) and always shoot raw if HDR matters ... not because of color. RAW is about light and in real estate, light is everything.
With the gear you showed you are almost complete and I think you did well considering this being your first time. I'll add a flash which always comes handy in order to cover areas with too much shadow and raw shoots may help as well. About the drone, remember that "legally" and under FAA regulation you need to have the commercial drone license (part 107) in order to do anything than recreational flights. Real Estate is considered commercial type flights even if you're doing a favor to yourself and you are using an under 249g drone like the DJI Mini. I'll pursue to certification if you feel you will be using drone pictures or videos in the near future or even to show them in your youtube channel... oh yes, this is considered commercial as well. I liked the way you presented the contents and ideas. Good luck!
Mostly a case of "everybody has a bad day" - or two. I don't know how these images were to be presented, but most real estate shots are framed around emphasizing space and minimizing flaws; the people looking at them generally wouldn't notice, or at least not care about, dust artifacts or lighting issues. To that end the most difficult bit is trying to even out exposure when there's light coming in windows and pouring out fixtures; you can try all you like with HDR but nothing beats illuminating the scene from the POV of the camera to calm down the dynamic range. Really you didn't do bad for a first attempt, save the equipment issues which can get anyone.
Appreciate the feedback. So you dont use HDR?
@@ArthurR No. My personal opinion is that it makes the images look 'faked'.
Something similar happened to me and I needed the photos urgently. Ended up using iPhone in manual mode and some quick edits. Was way easier and better than my a6000 + sigma 16mm tries
Having shot over 300 houses for the past 3 years I know how to shoot and what angles to look for. Lens wise you only need 16-35 f4 lens for full frame and 10-18 f4 lens for the crop body. I would say 98 percent of the time you use these lens. You can get away with wide angle prime lens for the interior. But for thr facade it is better to us zoom lens to create that compressed look that sells the house. One of the top selling Agents I work with always want that shot.
This is wonderful. I am a full time real estate photographer. I appreciate your effort. Real estate photography is a wonderful art. Time, patience, effort, eventual mastery. Keep it up. I have some amazing editors if you want those images completed to a professional level for a fair price. Let me know.
Well done Arthur, regards
This story begins as do all stories begin which are in our life to humble us, to teach us, and allow us to grow. "... with a simple favor I was going to do..." and "easy, not a problem..."
Hi just an observation you are not putting the prop guard correctly and that might deform them which can cause unwanted vibrations
hi. thx for the video) you can put camera vertically and do some panoramas. also real estate videos make now quite a lot of sense, not just the photos
I am not sure you can do bracketing hdr with 8 bit jpeg. You need 12 or 14 bit raw. Also, you must have the same color temp for all bracketing shots. That is why yours came purple, I guess.
Interesting thought, you might be right, although the guide I watched recommended AWB....
@@ArthurR With RAW there is no printed white balance. Big bonus with that!
I can relate!!
Спасибо, было очень познавательно. На мой взгляд, лучшее видео на канале из тех что я смотрел. Смотрел, понятное дело, не все.
Moral of the story: just shoot the whole thing on iPhone 😅 The ultra wide is 13mm equivalent, you can shoot raw or HDR and you can fit it super close to the walls. And since the sensor is small, no need to stop down for depth of field. I’m not a professional, but for the few listings I’ve shot, I’d say it’s perfect for the job.
I have a shot couple properties with kit lens 16-55mm with a6400.
No issues.
Yea might not be wide enough, but it got the job done. For what I was being paid it was plenty enough.
Flash? No
Learned quickly online that it's a minor difference to realtors shooting with flash vs hdr.
Shot with hdr, raw, combined everything in lightroom, edited it all up quick with no issues
Thats impressive.
@ArthurR that is really weird to why you would have the bracketing issues. I got away with 3 Brackets, 5 should cover it no issues.
3 bracket with 1 stop between.
I think its because of shooting in JPEG, because then you have literally no flexibility in post editing. I've tried editing jpeg and you have like maybe 20% flexibility of what raw has.
One thing I notice about real estate photography is it's intentionally misleading and mostly useless e.g. almost always super wide angle shots, even wider than most cellphone cameras, and none of the shots give you any useful information to determine the plan, so you're forced to go see the property if they don't include one in the listing.
Real estate photography is just another marketing tool in the end, and it's about as dishonest as it gets. I feels like it's the antithesis to photography, which imho, should - outside artistic use cases - capture reality as closely as possible.
Excellent real estate photography does not mislead. It enhances and makes things look beautiful. Using super wide angle lenses is a bad idea.Too much distortion and it misleads viewers into perceiving size.
Two real estate photographers to learn from: Nathan Cool, and Mike Kelley. I think both would agree that you really need to use Photoshop (or in my case I use Affinity Photo) so that you can use layers and mask windows, skylights, etc. Lightroom HDR just won’t cut it.
Affinity's automated HDR thing has been surprisingly good for me.
Yes you want the room to look spacious but you don’t want it to look unrealistic… with that said I’ve never shot anything wider than 16mm full frame. A powerful flash is more important than anything in real estate photos. I’m not a fan of HDR either because most camera/software don’t do a good job and usually ended up with weird patterns. A flash-ambient blend gives me much more control. Also, SHOOT RAW! The contact between the interior and exterior is way too much fora jpeg to handle.
Iphone ultrawide is 13mm equivalent. I used both real camera and the smartphones when I sold my house. Sometimes the iphone is better. Especially its smart HDR and super sharpened look actually works great for real estate. and the other thing I learned was some of these "professional" photography has no clue what they are doing.