We have all read a great deal of blogs about pros as well as books by pros. In these books, there is a great deal of information about lighting, but the golden rule is if you want to take good landscape photos the best light occurs either early in the morning or in the late afternoon.
The reality of course, is that this is often not an option for us mere mortals. We do not have the flexibility to get up at the wee hours of the morning and trek to a good spot that we scoped out the day before and stay there for several hours getting good shots. If we did this, our families would kill us.
Therefore much of the light we get to shoot in is of the worst kind. It occurs when the sun is high above during the mid day. The other reality is that you may find that the sky is cloudy and ugly on that particular day. However, this does not necessarily mean that all hope is lost. There are a number of options available to you and in this post, as well as future ones, I will go over these in more detail.
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Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 12:40 pm. Add a comment
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.
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Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 1:16 pm. Add a comment
One nice offshoot of my first take with HDR is that another agent asked me to shoot one of his listings. Of course I obliged and was determined to fix some of the things I didn’t like with my earlier shoot. In general, I am pleased with the results.
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.
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Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 12:27 pm. Add a comment
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. Continue Reading…
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 12:54 pm. 1 comment
Recently I have begun to do quite a bit more HDR work, particularly in the area of real estate. I currently have only hotshoe flash – the 580EX – and I can only take it off camera as far as my sync cord will let me. With some properties, this has forced me to rely on HDR in order to get the lighting right. In general, I like the effect of HDR on certain landscape shots but dislike it for real estate – my opinion being that it makes the light too flat and the shots lit with multiple flashes look more dramatic. Nevertheless, I decided that it was time to learn more about HDR so I found a copy of the The HDRI Handbook: High Dynamic Range Imaging for Photographers and CG Artists +DVD
at my company’s library and took it home to read. Originally I planned to buy the book online but then decided it was better to preview it first. To be honest, I was very glad that I did this, because overall I do not plan to purchase it.
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Posted 2 years, 3 months ago at 4:15 am. Add a comment