When I first saw HDR photos mentioned in some article, I just assumed that it meant "High Definition something". I thought it's not a big deal because everyone seems to have an HD camera with mega pixel resolution.
I thought that to get those beautiful magazine like photos all you needed was an expensive mega pixel camera. So I bought a nice Nikon camera thinking that that was my ticket to getting beautiful pictures for my listings. I became very disappointed in my results. They were OK but nothing special.
I'm not an expert so I'll leave the detailed explanation of HDR photogaphy to a photographer. It's basically trying to mimic what your eye and brain do automatically througout the day. Your eye is constantly taking many snapshots of your surroundings and your brain is then processing all of those exposures and creating what you think you see as "reality".
What forced me to start hiring a professional photographer was when a seller of mine asked me how another home for sale in his neighborhood got such sharp and perfect looking pictures. This seller prided himself as an amatuer photographer and he had me use for his listing the pictures that he had taken with his high end camera.
So I called up a guy I had met through ActiveRain, Iran Watson, who was a real estate agent turned photographer. His onine portfolio was amazing.
I hired Iran on that listing and attended the photo shoot. I wanted to see what it takes to get a good picture. It was quite a learning experience.
Twenty five scenes took about 3 hours. What I learned is that you need to capture good content using good equipment but the magic is in the layering of the best parts of many exposures of the same scene.
To get that good content, you need a very sturdy tripod and a remote shutter release so that there is absolutely no vibration or changes from one exposure to the next. Iran not only takes a few exposures above and below the normal range, he takes extra exposures where he blasts certain areas with a big hand held flash or exposures using remote flashes to light up areas in the distance. From his extensive experience, he knows what needs to be done to make the final picture pop.
Iran has special gizmos for many special situation. For the interior shots, it really doesn't matter what the natural lighting is like. He can make a dark room look like a perfectly lit showroom.
As I mentioned, the magic is in the processing. He is an expert at PhotoShop and uses that to layer together the best sections from each exposure. I watched an online video about the process and was completely overwhelmed at what the learning curve would be. It's not only the layering, you need to straighten the right lines in the shot, do color corrections and other touchups. So I decided not to even think about going down the path of doing it myself.
Here are some side by side comparisons.
Notice the lighting in general. Also the views out the windows are always seen. Notice the straigt lines of the walls even with the wider angle lens that allows the dining room into the scene in the back. Also, that little segment of the back dining room would be dark if not for the remote flash that was used in that room
It's the same scene but the one on the right just looks so much better.
Here you can see how that nasty sunlight coming in the window is dealt with. It's the same time of day in both pictures. You can now see the beautiful floors. Also the colors are corrected in some fashion so that they show up looking what they really look like in person.
Again, you can see out the window.
What I recommend is that you do not use a professional photographer like Iran Watson. Imagine if all listing photos looked so nice? I would have one less talking point to set myself apart from other agents :)
So just keep taking your photos with your iPhone. It's a lot less expensive and I'm sure your sellers never bother to look at their listing photos anyway.
Comments(4)