Good Listing Photos: For Good Listing Photos Use the Right Equipment

Real estate photography, especially taking listing photos, presents special challenges, especially lighting and field of view.

Unlike studio photography, lighting is not easily controlled when out in the field, shooting photos of homes. The most common lighting challenge is managing high contrast. You can see many examples of this problem in any selection of non-professionally shot real estate listing photos. The intertior views of rooms will tend to be dark, while any windows will be completely white. This problem occurs because digital cameras cannot capture the range of brightness and darkness in the scene, so a compromise is the result.

Another common problem is field of view. Both with exterior and interior views of homes often requires getting in close to the subject. Normal camera lenses do not show enough of the scene, so the photgrapher ends up backing up to try to capture a wider view. There are limits to this technique, and the result is usually narrow views of rooms and exterior views that either do not show the entire house or are taken from a long distance away, so that you see a lot of sky and street in addition to the house.

Professional real estate photographers (and good listing agents who have learned real estate photography) overcome these challenges by first investing in the right equipment. There are three main pieces of equipment needed to get good real estate photos:

a good DLSR camera
wide angle lenses, and
a tripod.

Most of what I have to say today is about cameras and lenses, but I mention tripods because they are essential for controlling camera movement. This may not seem like a big problem, but we could not do quality work without tripods. In many cases we do HDR (high dynamic range) photography to balance the lighting (solving the contrast problem mentioned above). If you learn how HDR photography is done you will quickly understand the necessity of a tripod.

DSLR Cameras

The best type of camera for real estate photography is a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera. With a DSLR you have several advantages over less sophisticated point-and-shoot cameras:

What you see through the viewfinder is what the camera lens sees – because you
are looking through the lens. Non-DSLR cameras have a separate viewing lens for
the view finder, and what you see is not necessarily what the lens
sees.

You can use any of a wide variety of lenses, because the lenses are detachable and interchangeable. In most real estate photography a wide angle of view is essential. DSLRs can accommodate lenses with an effective focal length of 16 mm to 24 mm, which professionals rely upon for good results.

You can attach a separate flash unit to a DSLR camera, or you can attach the camera to an array of multiple flash units for more complex
lighting situations.

The disadvantages of DSLR cameras are that they are more complex, they are bulkier, and they are more expensive. For these reasons most real estate agents who shoot their own listing photos use relatively small, inexpensive point-and-shoot digital cameras.

Compact Digital Cameras For Real Estate Photography

Unfortunately, most of the point-and-shoot digital camera models are not at all suited to real estate photography. This is one reason that so many listing photos look amateurish, and why the best agents either buy good cameras or hire professional photographers.

The main problems with the vast majority of point-and-shoot digital cameras are that they don’t come with wide angle lenses that are needed for close-in shots, and they don’t allow you to add an external flash unit. As a result interiors tend to look dark, and the narrow angle of view captures too little of most rooms.

While those problems are true of most compact digital cameras there are a few that are acceptable compromises in comparison to DSLRs. Here are two: