Switching to HDR in real estate
After a number of disagreements with my wife on how to light real estate photos, naturally my wife won. Therefore, we came to an agreement that she gets me a copy of Photomatix and I start taking pictures in HDR.
Being not familiar very much with HDR, I used one of her listings that is coming up to try it out. The listing is a foreclosed property and has promise but needs a lot of work on the inside.
I must say that I am quite impressed with the new version of Photomatix. It is easier now to create images that aren’t as fake as they used to be. I also like the RAW file support and the ability to create an HDR shot from a single RAW file, which is fun to play with. They even added support for the 5D Mark II, so they are definitely on top of things.
I certainly will not claim that these are the perfect HDR shots. I still have a bit to learn. Eventually I should read the manual for Photomatix to figure out what all of the settings truly do. Right now I just mess with a number of them until I get what I like.
I was also a bit lazy in how I did the exposures. I just picked a medium exposure and then set the camera to bracket 1 1/3 stops each way. After processing the pictures, this is not the optimum way to do this.
In my next shoot, which I hope will occur next week, I plan to meter the high and low ends of the dynamic range and then take a shot at each stop. For instance, I’ll first meter the windows, then the dark corners. This means the number of shots per room will be different but I suspect the results will be better.
The shot above is a prime example. Obviously none of the shots I took metered the window correctly. The corner on the left is also a bit dark. However, I do like the exposure in the room to the right.
In this shoot I also did something rather small. I placed a hot shoe leveler on the camera to make sure all shots were completely level. In general I am happy with the verticals in these shots and I think that is one reason why.
I have also read about a technique that involves using a bounced flash set to manual mode with HDR, in order to improve the brightness of the walls and ceilings. I like this idea, but my rule is to only try one new thing at a time (so if it doesn’t work I’ll know what went wrong) so I’ll try that idea on a future shoot - most likely one of my wife’s so I can reshoot if I don’t like the effect.
Overall I think that I will continue to take HDR shots as I prefer to not have to figure out where to put the lights all of the time.
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Tags: HDR, photography, real estate