Cameras come in two leagues broadly speaking, amateur and professional. The amateur cameras are typically DSLR, mid-range in price around £700 to £1300 and are often used by agents in conjunction with a wide-angle lens. 10-24 lenses are popular to give a wide field of view. These cameras have a limited sensor to see the image and are known as crop sensor cameras. To get the full size of what the lens can see you need a professional full frame sensor camera. So, a 10 lens on a crop sensor camera equates roughly to a 14 lens on a pro camera. The lower the number the wider the field of view, however, if you get too wide, over about 90 degrees of view it becomes really obvious that you are using a wide-angle lens and apart from going a bit fish-eye in its look the viewer can feel a bit conned, so there is a balance to strike. The only problem for agents is that these come in at a cost of around £4,000 and can go above £10,000 for the camera body and about £3,000 per lens. If you look at a camera and you are not sure if it is a professional one, then the easiest way is to feel the weight. Professional camera bodies are made much stronger and are far heavier. Because the image is cropped on the crop sensor cameras the view is limited and the lens distortion is greater. We all know that expensive cameras in the hands of negotiators is not a good idea when they have a habit of leaving them on desktops, chairs, shelves, kitchens, car seats and anywhere generally where they can easily get broken. The bottom line is if you want good results out of a camera you need good kit. In a sense that isn’t strictly true. You can get good results of cheaper equipment but, it would take so long to do it would not be commercially viable. That expensive kit maybe affordable for some agents and they may look after it but, knowing how to use it properly is both a science and an artform. Not always things that lie comfortably in an agent’s skill set. Apart from that it takes months of detailed training to get proficient. It’s not like going on a DEA course and coming back with a certificate. With professional cameras there are lots of advantages for real estate shoots:-
The better-quality professional camera manufacturers, notably Canon, have developed lenses specifically for the real estate and architectural photography industries. We use these high specification lenses.
A tilt-shift lens for example keeps all the vertical lines vertical whilst enabling you to see more floor and less ceiling or vice-versa. On conventional lenses of any type if you tilt the camera at an angle towards the floor the corners of the room start going off at a weird angle and you end up with what the photography industry calls a ‘fun house’ look.
17 Tilt Shift Lens
11-24 Lens
The tell-tale signs of an amateur at work on real estate shoots are the images not being straight and level and uncorrected lens distortion in the form of bowing doorways that are close to the camera etc.
Normal on-camera flashes are limited in their power. This in turn restricts the exposure range that you can use with the camera. Therefore, most flash shots in rooms with windows give a hazy glimpse of what is going on through the window but missing the comprehensive properly exposed detail that makes the shot believable.
Professional flash guns are different in three major ways: -
To create one image, we can use anything up to five flashes in one photograph.
AD600 Bulb
Speedlight Flash Guns
AD600 Flash Gun
AD200 Flash
Diffusers is a general term that describes anything that softens light. So, net curtains in a window diffuse daylight, for example. With photography they take a variety of forms namely, flash shoot through and bounce umbrellas, scrims, and various flash attachments.
Diffused light is softer and stops flash shadow edges being so harsh. Flash shadows appear the far side of lamp shades, for example. Diffusers can be as simple and cheap as a piece of toilet paper held over a flash gun costing less that 1p to 5Ft wide umbrellas with grids on professional stands mounted at very specific angles for best effect coming in at a cost of about £300. They can be used individually or together, to shoot through and scatter light, bounce off to make the light source bigger, or even block out light. A lot of photography is the art of shaping light, and diffusers help do just that.
Because a lot of the editing is based on blending several images together each image needs to be taken from precisely the same position. Consequently, any movement of the camera in a sequence of images, taken at different settings, can abort the final blended image. Sturdy heavy grade professional tripods are essential. Even good quality tripods that cost over £100 are not good enough. That would just be money badly spent in our case. We use the industry leading ‘Manfrotto’ tripods that are steel rather than the lighter carbon fibre and are far less prone to any movement. So that we can get the camera straight and level in all three dimensions before we even think about taking a shot we use what are known as professional geared heads. Even ball-head tripods which, are considered quite advanced, are not fit for purpose for this work. We must go professional to get the best results each time.
