How not to photograph a million dollar house
On Thursday I receive a call from Nelya at work. She had finally received permission from the bank to list the house! “Great”, I replied. “We can photograph it this weekend”.
Of course, we didn’t have until the weekend. The property had to be listed that day. The real estate world does not wait for photographers, so I managed to beg a 40D off of one of my friends (I am still waiting for the 5D Mark II) and I went to the house that night to photograph.
It was that night that I learned how not to photograph a house.
First, when photographing a house. Do not ever photograph it at night. I learned this the hard way. Granted, I could have done things to make the shot above look less hideous, however the main problem is the interior shots looked cramped. Take a look at this shot.
For a comparison, here is the version I shot on Saturday with a borrowed 5D.
Which room would you think is larger? This also brings me to the second cardinal rule - always shoot in wide angle. I actually used the same lens for both shots - the Canon 16-35 2.8L II. However, the first one was shot with a 40D while the second with a 5D. The cropped sensor of the 40D means that the only lens I would ever use with that camera would be the Canon EF-S 10-22mm.
Another problem that I had was that I do not have the RAW converter for the 40D files on my machine. Since I was in a hurry, I just edited the JPG files, while normally I am used to processing the RAW files. Therefore, the colors turned out quite abysmal.
The pictures were so bad that I actually received my first complaint about them. Another agent e-mailed Nelya begging her to change the pictures. I already had planned to reshoot a number of them on Saturday, but after reading the e-mail I decided to reshoot the entire house.
Ultimately, we really had no choice about shooting at night. We needed to have the house listed and that was the only option. In the future, we will shoot the house before we have the official go to list it since once we receive the permission it needs to be listed within less than 24 hours.
The house is receiving a lot of attention right now and may even be sold by the time you read this. The first wave of visitors all saw the ugly pictures, so the damage seems to be small. Now, of course, we have much better shots for the property.
So in summary, the following are the lessons learned.
- Do not shoot at night, particularly with interiors.
- Use a wide angle lens - 16-17mm equivalent.
- Always shoot in RAW.
I already knew about the second two, but I was surprised at the difference between shots during the day vs at night.
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Tags: don'ts, house, interior, mistakes, night, photography, real estate