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Continuing the HDR process

As many of you know, I have switched my real estate photography to HDR.  It has taken me a bit of time getting used to it but I do like it much better.  In particular, I am able to shoot houses quicker – which makes a difference now that Nelya is getting a lot of listings!

Recently she got another listing and I went out to photograph it.  There were two main goals I hoped to fix.

• Fix the reflections on the floor from the windows.
• Improve the view from the windows.

One interesting thing with this house was the absence of light fixtures.  This meant that I needed to depend entirely on ambient light, which worked out very well for HDR.  The other agent co-listing the property tried shooting it with his SLR and mentioned that the shots didn’t come out very well.  The interior of the house was very dark, while the windows were very bright – making it perfect for HDR.

I shot a lot of frames for many of these.  Many of them used eight shots to create the HDR.  In particular I did this to make sure the reflection onto the floor wasn’t overexposed.  I think I succeeded in this respect as the floor is not overexposed here.

The shots are deliberately darkened a bit per request from my wife (who is the realtor).  This makes them look a little less fake from the HDR effect – though in the shot above it’s still a bit obvious from the window.

I decided to try to fix the window, and blended the shot from the window from the image with the best window exposure onto the HDR shot.

I think this is a definite improvement, though there is probably some work still to do here.  In particular, I’m not sure the HDR and non HDR parts of the shot work well with each other, but it is a good start.

I could have taken the outside shots without HDR, but I wanted to keep them consistent.  Interestingly, I did not notice that I had the same reflection issues in the exterior shots as I did with the interior – something I will need to pay closer attention to next time.  As the exterior shots had less apparent dynamic range, I only used about four exposures for each of them.

Overall I believe that I am still improving and I will have ample opportunity to improve more in the near future.

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Tags: exposure, HDR, photography, real estate, technique