My first million dollar shoot
This weekend, I had the opportunity to shoot my first property over one million dollars (1.243 million to be exact). The property is in a hot neighborhood and is priced hundreds of thousands below its competition, so I was excited to finally shoot a house like this. The house was also the largest I have shot to date.
Of course, I actually had the ‘opportunity’ to shoot this house twice, as my original pictures taken at night turned out so bad that I needed to reshoot. The following is what I learned from this shoot.
First, am slowly starting to get the hang of multiple lights. I currently shoot with a 580EX and a 580EX II triggered by Pocketwizard MultiMAXes. I detest most of the HDR real estate shots I have seen and I prefer the more natural look provided by this method. However, as you can see from the shot below, I still need to work on my technique quite a bit. The shot below has serious problems with the lighting.
This time at least, I did get quicker at positioning the lights and setting the power on them. The first time I tried shooting with multiple lights, it took me over two hours to shoot a small condo. On the latest attempt, it took me about an hour and a half to shoot a 4200 square foot home.
I am finally realizing that knowing how to position the lights so they provide the desired light and do not reflect into windows and shiny things is something that needs practice – not instruction. I have read numerous pieces of advice on how to position lights, but in truth you just need to try it yourself and practice. Unfortunately, I still need to practice some more.
The shot above shows that I still need to look into purchasing a third light. In previous homes I did not really need one, but that wasn’t the case with this home. Here, I had one light on the floor below me and another that I bounced off the ceiling above me. Ideally, I would have liked to have a light in the office so that room wasn’t dark.
I have already reached an agreement with Nelya that if she lists another home like this I can have my third light. I will most likely purchase an Alienbees light together with a power supply, as I also found that for some rooms I needed one of my flashes at maximum power. That was OK for this house, but I did realize that with some of these multi-million dollar homes with the sweeping staircases I will need more power (and those homes neighbor this one).
Still, at times I did feel the need for the ‘fake colors’ as Nelya calls them.
Here I had a flash mounted on a silver umbrella behind me, and another one to the left of the room lighting the tub. This is perhaps another room that could have benefited from three lights. When I do buy the Alienbees light, I am thinking about putting a very large softbox on it to provide even light. I would then use my smaller flashes to remove the shadows that necessitate the shadow/highlight feature.
I do think that when I finally remove my reliance on shadow/highlight, I will have turned another page in my real estate photography skills.
By the way, the Pocketwizards really showed their stuff today. Admittedly I haven’t played around with the ST-E2 much, but I severely doubt it would have worked in many of the situations today where there was a wall or floor between me and the other lights. Also, I often shot with the light behind me, as in this shot. The other light here was in the walk in closet.
All in all I had fun shooting this house. I still have a ways to go with my photography but I can see improvement which is the important thing. My next goal is to remove my dependency on shadow/highlight and from there the differences are really fine points – the fine points that make the difference between an average photo and an amazing one. Of course these fine points take a significant amount of time and experimentation to properly learn.
Of course, even nicer is that it appears that the home will sell quickly.
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Tags: house, lighting, million dollar, photography, pocketwizards, real estate