The image above is a seven image exposure blend using my TS-E 24 II and my new Singh-Ray Color Combo.  I really like how the Color Combo brought out the blue in the sky.  As those of you who live here know, blue skies are quite rare here.  Had I not used the filter the sky would have been whitish and I would have had to do some post processing to get the sky bluer – though it would not have looked as natural as it does here.

Above is another image with the Color Combo.  While the previous image was not shifted very much, this one had a bit more shift.  As you can see the vignetting with the TS-E 24 II is minimal.  I generally use the TS-E 24 II for exterior shots and the TS-E 17 for interiors.

The above image used by TS-E 17.  The TS-E 17 does not accept filters  – though a polarizer would have had a negative effect indoors anyways.  In this shot I replaced the windows in Photoshop.  I did it rather quickly and am not crazy about the result but these images will be viewed small.  I also used one of my new toys – Viveza by Nik Software.

This weekend I purchased the Complete Collection by Nik Software using a discount on Ron’s blog.  I have been having fun playing with all of the tools in the package (except for SilverEfex – right now I do not do too much in black and white), but for real estate so far Viveza is the only one I need.  I found that by adding a bit of warmth to the shot and removing some of the green the shot looks a lot better.

The above is another similar shot in these conditions.  In this case the window removal came out a bit better.  I honestly just used the quick select tool in Photoshop.  In some cases it works well while in the previous shot I should have been a bit more careful.

Next week I have my final toy coming – well sort of.  We ordered a G11 for an upcoming vacation where I will not be able to take my 5D2.  Of course, it is probably foolish to think that I will have a chance to use it, as Eitan has been wanting that camera and will quickly take it from me.

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Some time ago my wife, who is a real estate agent, had a listing that I took photos of.  The shoot was quite difficult and I wound up having to reshoot the property.  In retrospect, it was an important property for me because it was what eventually prompted me to move from pure HDR to exposure blending.

The shot above was one of the photos stolen and certainly has its flaws – the worst of which are probably the incorrect verticals.

Unfortunately, after quite a bit of work by both myself and my wife, my wife realized that this wasn’t going to work out so she cancelled the listing.  The seller then relisted the property several months later with a different agent.

Of course, the new agent helped herself to my photos, and I have of course insisted that these photos be removed.  If they are not removed soon, I intend to send her the bill for my services and pursue this in court if they are not removed.

What bothers me even more though was the response from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS).  When I contacted them asking what I needed to do to get the photos removed, a rude woman responded that they will not take any requests from photographers.  The listing agent must submit a complaint.  Luckily the previous listing agent in this case was my wife so she filed the formal complaint using the form she mentioned.

So far NWMLS has not bothered to reply to the complaint, which has me even more angered.  I am half tempted to file a lawsuit against them for copyright infringement.  This is simply not correct.  If a photographer sends them a certified letter demanding his images be removed from their site, they must do this.  NWMLS must understand that real estate agents do not own the copyright for these photographs – the photographers do.

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While I am happy that I made the switch to HDR, I have still been working on getting the colors right and improving my photos.  In this post, I will discuss some things I have learned during the last few weeks.

Lesson 1 Windows do not always need to be the correct temperature

In this shot, I spent a painstaking amount of time replacing the windows in the original shot with ones of the correct temperature.  This arises because the light inside the house is tungsten, while the outside light is closest to cloudy.

In the original shot, the windows were blue.  You can still see this blue on the floors in this shot, which detracts considerably.  One person mentioned that they look like ‘pools in the floor’.  Despite the amount of work, it wasn’t worth it.  The color shift in the windows looks too extreme – especially given the reflections.  This is one case where keeping the original blue of the windows wouldn’t have hurt the original photo.

I went back to this house to retake a number of shots and this is the new one.

I made a number of changes in this shot other than simply keeping the color.  Actually, I shot this at a cloudy white balance compared to tungsten from above.  During the day time, I felt that the strong light from the windows was stronger than the weak tungsten lamps in the room.  This also accentuates the view – which is a big selling point of the house.

Another big change was the use of exposure blending compared to HDR.  In general, I have found that most of the time exposure blending provides better, more natural results.  There are some exceptions – such as very strong windows – where HDR works better.  However, in my last two shoots only one out of the fifteen pictures was HDR.

I also removed the flash that I used in the original shots.  The first time, I added a flash fired by Pocktewizards with a tungsten gel.  I still think the flash idea has promise, but I do think the tungsten gel may have made the shot look a bit too tungsten.  With a different house, I tried not using a gel on the flash but in some respects it was worse.  I then had colors of 2850, 5500, and 6000 in the same shot – which required some Photoshopping to return to an essence of normality.

Lesson 2 Do not shoot at night and if you do, do not use HDR

There are multiple things wrong with this shot, but the halos certainly do not help it.  The orange color is also too strong – as is the blue.  I spent some time working with this shot, and could not get it better than the one here.

The next time, I changed the angle a bit and photographed during the daytime.

I do think dusk shots can be useful for the outside of the house, but there must be something else in the photo besides the actual house that is interesting at dusk.  This may be a driveway with lights going down it or a beautiful entry way.  In this case though, I do not believe viewing the house at dusk helped at all.  The photo above may be more normal and less dramatic, but it also gives a better idea of what the house actually looks like.

Lesson 3 Be very careful with view shots

There are technical issues with this photo, but in truth there are two things far worse.  First, I took this photo of the view from the house with a wide angle lens.  This is the actual view and is not a distortion of the real view.

The first problem is that people still do not believe this.  Without a frame that indicates that the view truly is the one from the house, a number of viewers mentioned that they thought I took it with a telephoto and was not being honest.

Another problem is the power lines.  Power lines are evil and many people (including myself) run far way from any house that has power lines too close to it.  Although these power lines are not close to the house at all, the image makes it look so.

The fix was a significantly different shot, that also used exposure blending compared to the HDR above.

Here, I added a piece of the porch to show that this is truly the view you get.

Lesson 4 – Avoid the ‘Light of Death’

Again, there are multiple things wrong with this shot.  One of the primary things is the huge blinding light in the middle of it – with radial spokes like a small sun.  While this is a rather pretty light, it certainly takes away from the rest of the shot.

Another big issue is the orange cast in the shot.  The colors are simply off.  Finally, the viewpoint is not so great.  On the left, we have a set of flowers trying to creep in and on the right we have what looks to be a miniature kitchen.  I simply tried to get too much into this shot.  Interestingly, this shot did use exposure blending in the first place.

In this shot, I only focused on the dining room and took the kitchen in a separate shot.  The light is still bright, but since I was further away from it, it does not look like a blinding sun.  Also, the light from the windows – since I shot during the daytime – tones it down a bit.

This was also a good case showing that daytime shooting is almost always better than night time.  The nice green from the windows really helps here – compared with the black from the night shots.

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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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One thing that I am pleased with in these shots is that I did not blow out the windows as I did before.  In my first attempt I was a bit lazy and just set the camera to bracket the exposures.  This time, I metered the windows and then metered the darkest part of the room, then took a shot each stop in between.  I like the results of this much better.

Of course, there are some things I would like to improve.

In the shot above, I feel the effect of the light on the right is too strong.  On one hand, I like the light there.  However I do not like the strong light on the wall and I need to figure out eventually a good way to get rid of it.

Kitchens are difficult rooms due to all of the reflections. I think I did decently here, though I would prefer to get rid of the reflection on the floor and the sink is a tad overexposed.  I could probably clone out the reflection on the floor, but there are probably better ways.  The next time I think I’ll try turning out the lights for one or two shots when I suspect reflections will be an issue.  I am curious to see what Photomatix does in this case.  Of course, here the reflections were coming from the window so it may not have helped.

One thing I would like to get better at is making the windows ‘pop’ more.  I have read about ways to do this using exposure blending and I think I’ll try it out some time.  With the pure HDR effect, I feel that the windows are a bit dull, though you can see out of them well.

I’m happy though that this is a step in the right direction.  I have several other shoots already planned as Nelya has several more listings coming and a new agent will use me.

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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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• Canon 14mm 2.8L
• Canon TS-E 24

I currently use the 16-35mm 2.8 II for all of my real estate photography, mounted on a full frame sensor.  Therefore I was very curious to see what the 14mm can do as well as the tilt effect of the TS-E 24.  The following shot used the 16-35.

Here is the comparison shot with the 14mm (first version).

As you can see, the 14mm does make a difference.  While the window on the right roughly lines up on the edge, with the 14mm you can see a bit of the bathroom.  The verticals are better on the 16mm shot, but that is due to camera position, not due to the lens.

Based on this result, I liked the 14mm but not enough to justify its price.  Perhaps if I were faced with a very large interior this would be the lens of choice, but for real estate photography I don’t think it’s worth it.

I also played a bit with the TS-E 24, though I don’t have the shots here.  I do think that I will purchase this lens someday but it’s mainly useful for outside shots – such as the front of the house.

The main problem is it is not wide enough.  I really like the width of the 16-35 at the wide end, though I do like the perspective correction with the TS-E 24.  I did play around with it with taking pictures with a mirror in the bathroom.  Supposedly it helps quite a bit taking pictures in rooms with a lot of mirrors – so you don’t wind up in one of the shots.  I found that the shift does help – but it is not a miracle maker.

Therefore I do plan to buy the TS-E 24 someday, but I’m not sure where it ranks in my current list of things to purchase.  For sure it ranks below buying an Alienbees light.

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• Not correcting for verticals
• Blown out areas from the flash
• Shadows
• Some parts of the photos were too dark

I had a number of theories on how to fix these issues, but for the lighting my idea was to purchase an Alienbees light and an extra Pocketwizard MultiMAX and use it as a third light.  One of my coworkers offered to stop by the house with a lot of the equipment that I am looking to buy someday so I was able to get a good look at what it can accomplish and whether it will solve some of my problems.

One note before I show these shots.  When we took these photos, we were mainly trying to see what the lights and lenses were capable of and what issues we may have.  We did not correct for verticals and I did not Photoshop any of these pictures.  In this way you can get a good idea what the equipment did without seeing what it looks like after Photoshop.

This shot was taken with the Canon 14mm 2.8 (the first version, not the II) and an Alienbees AB1600 with a 60″ x 30″ softbox behind me.  You can actually see the softbox quite well in the window.  In the adjoining bathroom, I placed a 580EX II aimed at the ceiling towards the end of the bathroom.

I noticed the following about the Alienbees light and the soft box, both from shooting at the property and from chatting with its owner.

• I definitely need to get one of these
• The 1600 works quite well here.  We did tone it down on most shots – around 1/16th at ISO 400.  The softbox also diffuses it quite a bit and it comes with a second diffuser that can slow it down another stop.
• I had been debating between a regular light vs their ring light with the moon light.  I believe for real estate the soft box works better, as it fits well to many of the doorways.  Behind me was a walk in closet and we placed the softbox squarely in the doorway.
• When I do buy it, I plan to pick up a Vagabond II for remote power.  We just plugged it in, but I think having a portable power source would be a lot more convenient.

By the way, I found a handy way of getting rid of the reflection of the softbox in the window.

Basically, I placed a 6’5″ gobo in front of the softbox – a bit to the side.  We didn’t move the softbox at all from the previous shot.  In simpler words, I stood in front of it and blocked the reflection.  It darkened that side of the shot a bit, but nothing that isn’t easily fixable in Photoshop.

Here’s a shot we did of the kitchen.

This was also shot with the two lights.  I had my 580EX in the part of the kitchen that is not visible.  There are a bit of shadows on the right side, but with another strobe that may be fixable.

I did run into some issues with my 580EX II.  I suspect that it has problems with its miniport.  I replaced it with a 580EX with a hot shoe cord to connect it with the Pocketwizard and that worked fine, so I may wind up triggering the 580EX II the same way I trigger the 580EX.

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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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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.

1. Do not shoot at night, particularly with interiors.
2. Use a wide angle lens – 16-17mm equivalent.
3. 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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