The business side of photography
Photography of real estate exteriors is best done when the weather and sunlight are both perfect. But it’s not usually possible to wait for ideal conditions.
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NHL hockey players from various teams used to practice together each August. These casual practices helped the players get in shape before the start of their respective team’s training camps in September. These Toronto-area practices were organized quietly so as not to attract public attention. But if you knew which ice rinks were being used, you could go and watch some top-level NHL players.
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When I used to photograph new model homes, the higher-end properties often had a large wood-burning fireplace. When this type of home was to be photographed, the builder’s sales rep often arrived with a couple of fire logs under their arm. They would start a fire in the main fireplace to make the photos look better.
Today when I photograph houses, I’m often the only person in the home and there are no lit fireplaces. A gas fireplace might not yet be connected or the gas not turned on. Plus, for liability reasons, I won’t turn on any gas appliance. It’s also out of the question for the photographer to start a wood-burning fire, assuming that wood was even available.
Photo retouching to the rescue.
It’s easy to digitally add flames to an otherwise empty fireplace. A glowing fireplace adds life to a photo and will change a dull black hole into a room highlight.
If your real estate pictures have a fireplace, light it up with a nice fire.
All real estate photographers straighten their photos so that vertical lines are in fact 90° vertical or very close to it. This isn’t difficult to do. But not all photographers straighten horizontal lines that have been distorted by a wide-angle lens.
Straightening horizontals is a bit more difficult and may not always be entirely possible. Wide-angle lens distortion is a fact of physics.
There are no automatic, one-click solutions to fix crooked horizontals especially if only a portion of the photo needs to be corrected. Photoshop has its Adaptive Wide Angle Filter which can work miracles. Sometimes a photo can be separated into sections and each section corrected on its own using various transform tools. In the photo above, the picture was split into two sections where the dividing line was the edge of the glass wall.
It’s easier to photograph a large bathroom than a small bathroom and large bathrooms always look better.
A large bathroom can be photographed in a single shot so minimal photo magic is required. There’s usually no need to blend or stitch multiple photos together.
Photographing small bathrooms is usually a challenge. It can be difficult to get the camera into the best position and your reflection is visible in mirrors and glass doors. Plus, a wide-angle lens creates lots of distortion in a small room.
A shift lens can sometimes be used to prevent your reflection appearing in a mirror or glass door. But getting all or most of a tiny bathroom in a picture usually requires some photo magic.
There are three types of colour photographs: those with bad colour, those with accurate colour and those with pleasing colour.
If the skin tones in your business portrait don’t look good or if your pictures have an overall colour cast, then your photos have a bad colour balance.
Accurate colour is required when the colours in a photo must match the real-life colours. For example, clothing colours in a catalog should match the actual colours.
Pleasing colour is for pictures that have to look nice rather than be absolutely accurate. Portraits often have pleasing colour because a nice skin tone is usually preferred over accurate skin colour.
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