Real Estate photography?  I’ve always been impressed with the stuff that I see on Flickr and in the the high end real estate ads that I see in the paper and brochures but I’ve never thought much about shooting it…until this week.

The Realtor I did the photo shoot with a few weeks ago gave me a call and asked if I would be interested in taking photos of one of his properties. I admitted to him that I hadn’t had not shot real estate but that I would try. We agreed on a small fee for my efforts.

On Wednesday, I shot a house he recently listed.  I used the D300 and the widest lens I have, an 18-50 2.8 Tokina.  It’s one of my favorite lenses and for the most part it take pretty wide shots.  But my D300 has a DX sensor or a crop (magnification) factor of 1.5.   That makes the lens effectively a 25ish – to 75 lens.  If this takes off, I’m gonna have to look into something in the ultra-wide lens to be able to show more of the rooms.

Lighting was a combination of long exposure ambient and 3 Nikon speed lights.  I shot CLS and used Radiopoppers to be sure I could get them around corners or in other rooms.   Oh, and to some degree, I even used the pop-up as more than a commander  although set very low power.

I was pretty slow to shoot the house this first time because it took me quite a while to figure out the lighting basics but applied my Strobist thought processes and got by okay.  I’m pretty sure I could shoot the next house of a similar size in about 1 1/2 hours.

It turns out he was very happy with the results. I see lots of problems when compared with the stuff I’ve seen in  ads and on Flickr but I’m reasonably happy with my first attempt.

Now he is talking about doing more shoots for him and he says he’ll talk to other Realtors in his office.  Apparently there isn’t anyone else in the area providing this service! Yeah!!

I hope this takes off and I can do more of these shots in the future – I keep you posted as to how it’s going.

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