Part Two
If you started on this entry, I recommend that you read Part 1 first. By special request, I have posted this to the General Photography Group and I thought it might also be of interest to the Advanced Group. I'm relatively new to AR, so if I've mis-posted, please let me know.
There are two reasons why I decided to buy Canon rather than other manufacturers for our camera equipment. The first relates to their digital signal processing technology, which is absolutely excellent. Though Canon has had a camera division for a long time, they have been manufacturing DSP (digital signal processing) technologies for a long time. Compare that to Nikon which has been, I think, primarily a camera/optics manufacturer. Here's a good example....did you know that the "engine" that drives a lot of the Hewlett-Packard printers is a Canon engine?
Anyway, after having looked at the images of many different cameras, I concluded that I liked the look of the image that the Canon DSP produced. But, even if that were not the case, the show-stopper for me was the issue of lenses. Canon had THE lens that I wanted to use for my home photography, and so I bought equipment to fit the lens.
Camera Lenses - The main issue with most interior photography is field of view. The bedroom may be nice and clean, but you may not be able to back up far enough to get the entire bedroom in the view of the camera. You can back up till you're at the doorway, but retreating any further means that the door frame/wall will block part of the image. In taking pictures of homes, you need AS MUCH field of view as you can get.
One approach to solving the problem is to get a fish-eye lens which can capture 160-180 degress of the image in front of it. Everyone knows the problem with fish-eye lens pictures....just look through the peep hole in your front door which is a fish-eye lens. The center of the photo looks ok, but at the edges, the lines get severely curved and warped.
Another approach to solving the problem is using photo-stitch software and a regular lens. Then you just move the camera and take overlapping photos and use photo stitch software to glue the photos together. I do not recommend trying to glue them together manually - I've done this in the past, and it can take hours to get it to look good. Photo stitching software works AMAZINGLY well on landscapes where the focal point may be a 100 yards away. Also, plants and trees due to their fractal-type designs allow blending which tricks the eye easily. Contrast this with photos at short range of a tile floor where the grout between the tiles makes a grid. Take a few pictures of such a room and run it through your typical photo stitching software and you will see that it completely breaks down with keeping the lines true. Lines will curve and stretch and it just looks weird. Trust me, the eye won't be tricked, and indeed, the brain will immediately say, "What's wrong with that floor?"
If you're shooting rooms with carpet, you'll have less problems, but, trust me, there are a LOT of lines in rooms. Skylightlights, the lines between walls, the lines between walls and ceilings, furniture, picture frames, etc. create a lot of straight lines. If the photo stitching software starts bending these lines, it just won't look right. There ARE some very high-end software packages that can do amazing things, but I don't think that they will achieve what I am going to discuss.
The PRIMARY reason why I went Canon was so I could buy the Canon 24mm Tilt/Shift Lens. Let's get the cost thing out of the way; it is slightly under the ouch price of $1500. (Before you say, "My gosh, there's no way I'm spending $1500 for a lens, read on and look at the pics below. Our Team can no longer say "Home Brochure" without giving thanks for our beneficent camera lens.) There are some other tilt-shift lenses out there, but most are 90mm or thereabouts and they are used for product photography. I don't know for sure, but as I recall, the Canon 24mm lens stood alone in its capabilities when I bought it. This lens lets you TILT the light (i.e., bend it as it enters the lens). This is often used for product photography as it allows one to change the focal distance as well as appearance. I don't use this feature on the lens very often.
The feature that I use on virtually every single home picture is the SHIFT capability. The lens sits on rails, and you can move the lens from left to right without moving the camera. So, with the camera on the tripod, you can move the lens to the left, take a picture, move it to the middle, take a picture, and then move it to the right and take a 3rd picture. Because the camera backplane has not moved, the three photos will overlay on top of each other PERFECTLY. You need to bring all three pics into Photoshop and align them, and I usually put the middle image on top. Then I erase the edges of the middle image with fuzzy eraser and the images blend PERFECTLY. The only issues I ever have are taking pictures outside when the wind is blowing really strong because the plants are dancing around which means they are not in the same place from frame to frame and thus the erasing can be a little tricky.
Some notes on what this means - My base images are around 20megapixels, which is higher resolution than most of the consumer cameras. This means that my images can be printed on 11x17 paper with no loss. Here's the really weird part about using this camera setup. Virtually ALL of my pictures are taken in portrait mode, i.e., the camera is tipped up on one end. BUT, since I'm shifting the lens from left to right and take 3 images, the image comes out as a horizontal image, but one that shows the height of tall ceilings. IN SHORT, this lens allows you to capture a LOT more height AND more width than you can with an equivalent non-shifting 28mm lens. Here's an example of my photo set and the resulting final image from a photo shoot last week.
I didn't give you the original middle picture as I thought it might be more useful to see how the blending occurred. I took these component parts and the final picuture is as follows:
As you can see, the final image looks pretty nice and definitely conveys what the room has to offer.
This is the end of part 2. I still have not gotten to talking about lights, exposure, and editing, so I'll post a Part 3 to discuss those items. I hope this stuff is of interest; if it is, please post a comment so I know if anyone is reading it. It takes a long time to write it all out. Thanks.
Margaret Hokkanen, Carlsbad Real Estate
Continue to Part 3, Flashes/Editing
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