Real estate photography is complex. The amount of skills you have to learn can seem daunting at times. It sure was when I first started! This post should help you better understand how to take a better picture for your real estate. If you don’t want to bother learning and would rather hire someone to do it for you, contact us today! We love what we do and we provide:
- Photography
- Twilight Photography
- Drone Footage
- 3D Walkable Tours using Matterport
- 4k Video Tours
If you want to learn a bit more about how be better at real estate photography, read on! Here’s how to take better pictures with Real Estate Photography.
Equipment
If you’re wanting to be serious about your real estate photography, you will probably need to throw down a few thousand dollars. If you just want to get better pictures, then you can get away with a cheaper camera. Most cameras nowadays will do, but there is a huge difference between amateur and professional equipment nowadays.
Camera: I use a Sony A7iii. It’s a full-frame, mirrorless camera, and I love it very much. I started out using a Panasonic Lumix G7, but quickly upgraded.
Lens: You’ll want something wide, but not obnoxiously wide. People are getting sued for taking pictures that misrepresent a listing, so keep it realistic, for the love of all things holy. I use a Sony Zeiss 16-35mm. 16mm is perfectly wide enough. If you’re using a crop sensor, you’ll want to take this into account. A Lumix G7 (Micro Four Thirds camera) has a crop factor of 1/2, so a 9mm lens is equal to an 18mm lens on a full frame. So if you get a 16mm lens on a M43 camera, it will be the equivalent of a 32mm. Keep this in mind, and spend your money wisely.
Tripod: Get something sturdy and that has bubble levels. You want to make sure your pictures are all straight and level. You don’t have to go nuts. Spend less than $100 but don’t cheap out. You want to make sure it’s very sturdy and won’t wiggle around with your camera’s weight on it. Don’t go to Walmart.
Flashes: Optional, but you’ll probably want to get some Speedlight’s if you’re wanting to take better pictures with Real Estate Photography and be more seriously equipped. When you do, you’ll need to get a flash trigger for your camera’s hot shoe to remotely trigger the Speedlight.
Composition
First up is composition. Composition is simply how the shot is composed. Is there garbage lying around in the shot? Are the pillows fluffed and in the right spot? Has the coffee table been wiped down? Is it crooked? Is the lampshade power cable showing?
Getting good composition is more than just making sure everything in the shot is looking nice, it’s also about the correct placement of the camera. You want to make sure that the shot looks like something someone would want to see. For instance, if it’s a living room, you’d want to shoot from a corner looking into the living room. You’d want to see the couch, the coffee table, any chairs, lights, etc. Getting good composition only has to take a moment, and the more shoots you do, the easier it will be for you to know what a good shot will look like before even taking a picture.
Exposure
Getting a proper exposure is extremely important for your real estate photography. Exposure refers to how much light is (or isn’t) going into the camera. If you’re shooting in manual mode, which you should be, the exposure will typically be changed by how long the sensor is open while taking a photograph. 1/250th of a second may be too short of a duration for the sensor to be open to let in all the light that it needs, so maybe consider opening up the shutter to a full second. If you’re shooting in F8 (which you should be, more on that later), typically the best setting for a fairly well lit room will be 1/8th of a second shutter speed, and 320-400 ISO (more on that later, too).
A great way to ensure you have proper exposure is to take a look at the histogram in your camera, enable zebra lines, or take a look at the exposure meter if your camera has one. A fantastic way to always get the right exposure, even if you take a picture that’s too dark, or too bright, is to shoot in RAW compressed. Shooting in RAW will capture more data and enable you to bring up or down the exposure in Adobe Lightroom Classic (which you should definitely be using).
If you’re planning on shooting HDR photography, you should consider using bracketing while taking your photographs. This is usually found in the settings, and I personally take my HDR photos using 3 different exposures, taken 3 stops apart. This basically means that the first picture will be 3 stops of exposure below 0/0, then another at 0/0, then another at 3 stops above, or +3. So for good bracketing, use -3, 0, +3. This will allow you to merge them together in Lightroom Classic to create a dynamic photograph, otherwise known as an HDR.
White Balance
Don’t be a hero. Set your white balance to auto and leave it. If you try and have manual white balance, you’ll always end up fixing it in post anyways. Save yourself some time. Even if the white balance is slightly off, you can take the eye dropper tool in Lightroom (again, you should most definitely be using Lightroom Classic if you aren’t already), and select something in the room that is white or grey, and the white balance will be corrected. This is another huge benefit of shooting in RAW. Pretty much everything can be corrected.
Camera Settings
Now, this will vary greatly depending on the time of the shoot, the amount of available light in any given room, and many more factors. But a rule of thumb for Real Estate Photography is to shoot in F8 (makes it so much more of the room is in focus, rather than shooting narrower like F2.8, where it will have one area of focus and the rest is blurry), use 320-400 ISO (artificial brightness, any higher than these and you risk getting noise in your photograph which is extremely difficult to fix in post, so don’t try it), and shooting anywhere between 1/200th of a second, all the way up to 1.3 seconds, or higher if need be. Remember, we’re hopefully shooting on a thick, stable, and untouched tri-pod, so you don’t have to worry about blurry shots.
Final Thoughts
There’s way more that goes into Real Estate Photography than this, but this should get you started. To learn quicker, just go online to Zillow or Redfin and take a look at some listings. This can give you a great idea of what makes a good photograph and will help you take better pictures almost immediately. Don’t try and do it on your own; there’s so much free information out there that will help you become a better Real Estate Photographer, so take advantage of it.
Real estate photography is complex. The amount of skills you have to learn can seem daunting at times. It sure was when I first started! This post should help you better understand how to take a better picture for your real estate. If you don’t want to bother learning and would rather hire someone to do it for you, contact us today! We love what we do and we provide:
- Photography
- Twilight Photography
- Drone Footage
- 3D Walkable Tours using Matterport
- 4k Video Tours
Hopefully this helped you get started taking better pictures with Real Estate Photography!