Pro real estate photographers answer questions about business, pricing, workflow, white balance, lenses and shooting tips in the live Q&A with Rob Moroto and Mark Morrow hosted by Ron Pepper on May 3rd, 2020.
See below for the discussion highlights about workflow, white balance, shooting tips and improving your real estate photography skills.
For the discussion highlights about business and pricing, see here.
The highlights were taken from the full discussion in the live streamed video below.
Ron Pepper
Rob Moroto from Calgary Photos is going to be joining me here to talk about real estate photography.
Rob Moroto
Hey there.
Ron Pepper
Okay. Let's bring on Jeff over here. Hey Jeff.
Jeff
Hi Ron. Hi Rob. How are you guys?
Ron Pepper
Real good. What brings you here?
Jeff
When I saw this on Facebook, I thought I'd jump in and ask a few questions because I love photography. I'm a high school teacher actually in Windsor, Ontario. But I liked doing it part time.
Jeff
Right. Did you begin with all... Did you do all the editing yourself in the beginning?
Rob Moroto
Yes, because in the beginning there was no outsourcing. It was all in house. Unfortunately, we didn't have Photomatix back then. I had this thing that was called... What was it?
Ron Pepper
Photoshop. Was it Photoshop before layers?
Rob Moroto
No. This was even before. We had... God, what was it called? It was a batching program called Enfuse. It was this thing that you downloaded, you ran it in terminal on Mac. You had to upload all your photos to it. It would take around eight minutes per photo to go from three images to a HDR. It was terrible.
Photoshop wasn't what it is today. My Photoshop skills aren't what they were back then.
Ron Pepper
Did you say your Photoshop skills had gotten less or more?
Rob Moroto
A little bit better. Just a little. But the program's gotten a whole lot better.
Ron Pepper
A lot of times those new tools come out to do work for us, then we don't use the Photoshop muscles as much. I think I used to be much more... I don't know if I was ever an expert. But I knew a lot more in Photoshop. Now there's so many tools to do things for us.
Jeff
Are there other specific ones you use?
Rob Moroto
Honestly, for me, for our workflow, we are predominantly, we use the Adobe Suite. We've got Bridge and Photoshop and Lightroom. Then Photomatix.
Those are the key three that we use. We use Bridge where, Bridge is like using a Finder's window on Mac. I don't know what the equivalent is in the Microsoft world.
Ron Pepper
Explorer.
Rob Moroto
Yeah. File Explorer or something like that. Then, from there, what we would do is we would look at the files and see which ones we want to use. Then we drag those over into Photomatix. Put it into an HDR.
Then we put it into Lightroom, do the editing. Then export from Lightroom. Then there's a couple of steps in between that we might one day share.
Ron Pepper
The plugin is taking a little bit of time because the first thing it does is it calls Lightroom to do the raw conversion. They're getting the best out of each tool that you use. Lightroom has that high end raw processor.
Rob Moroto
The one thing I love about the Photomatix Lightroom plugin is that you can do... If you've got a job where it's a little bit more intense.
For example, if you're doing something for a builder where you have to look at every single image and make sure that they're 100%, then the Lightroom plugin this way is fantastic because you do have that full control.
Otherwise, the other benefit and the main reason that we use Photomatix is because it has the ability to batch processing on the standalone version. That's fantastic.
All we would have to do is go into Bridge, look at all the photos that we're going to do. We attach a preset to it. Write the XML files. Then just drop the folder into Photomatix, press batch, and then it does everything.
If you've got 100 photos in a place, you can be done processing, actual hands on processing, at your computer in around two minutes. Then the rest of it is all automated. You just have to wait for the computer to do everything else.
Quite frankly, with the way that our business works... For example, we'd go to a shoot. We'd go to the door and knock on door and say, "Hello." Do the pleasantries for around five to 10 minutes with the homeowner.
Then we'd go through the home, turn on all lights, make sure everything is nice and put it away. Shoot the place in around half an hour. Then, again, ending pleasantries. Then we walk out.
All in all, you're done in around 40 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of the place. Once we do this, in two or three minutes on the computer, we can then just take the computer, put it onto the driver or the passenger seat of our car, and drive to the next shoot. By the time we're there, it's done.
Ron Pepper
Nice. Yeah. How how do you power the computer?
Rob Moroto
Whenever we go into a place, we bring in a bunch of gear and put it on the floor and say, "Hey, do you mind if I plug this in?" They look at it and they think, "Oh, you're bringing in a lot of gear to get your work done." It's like, "Yes, that's exactly it." Little do they know that...
We do just do that, well, for two reasons. Number one, we don't ever want to keep gear in our car because, if you're at a shoot and stuff gets stolen out of your car, it destroys your day because you can't get that stuff back and reprogram it in time for the next shoot.
Ron Pepper
You could easily have one of those smart thief type people that kind of know what you do, and see what's going to happen, and plan that.
Rob Moroto
Exactly. Oh, and for anybody out there that... We saw one of our friends do this. They thought it'd be a good idea to deco their car saying real estate photographer.
Jeff
Oh, good.
Rob Moroto
Okay. Not a good idea. Right? That car got broken into so many times. He's like, "Screw it. It's not worth the advertising."
Ron Pepper
Business tip. Don't put those decal writing on your car.
Unless it says, "I don't leave anything in here."
Rob Moroto
Even then.
Ron Pepper
Then you get caught carrying it around I guess.
Rob, did you know you can do batch processing within Lightroom now?
Rob Moroto
Oh. From stacks?
Ron Pepper
There's a new Photomatix batch plugin that just takes the stacks, all of the stack, and treats them as a bracket and just runs it.
Rob Moroto
Really? Oh okay. I'm going to have to play with that.
Ron Pepper
Just from what you're saying, I like to use Bridge in a lot of cases because one of the longest processes that's in my life is importing into Lightroom. I'm kind of down with using Bridge as well. However, this is still common. I still use Lightroom because it's just, maybe I'm invested in it.
Rob Moroto
It's so beautiful.
Ron Pepper
I like Capture One as well. But yeah. Anyway. A couple of just different options for you.
Because some of the questions that I get a lot, the answer is there are so many answers. There's so many possibilities in your workflows, and then the stuff that has to do with how you shoot, what you like to do, and how you're working.
Rob Moroto
Of course.
Rob Moroto
We get that question all the time. It's like, "What do you use?" Essentially it's just the Adobe Suite and Photomatix as a general. But then I use Capture One whenever I'm shooting with my Fuji. My Fuji GF and my 50R, which is a medium format. If I'm shooting with that, then yes. Capture One is so much nicer.
Ron Pepper
Are you actually tethering it for real estate?
Rob Moroto
No. This is more for my other commercial stuff that I do.
Ron Pepper
Right. That makes sense. Yeah. That's kind of what the Capture One was really started out for. Right? Was studio, especially like still life, and-
Rob Moroto
Yeah. Definitely different for that. But, for the rest of the stuff we're shooting, mostly Canon. For that stuff, the Adobe stuff works so much better.
Ron Pepper
Focus on white balance guys, if you're getting started. Focus on white balance when you start out with real estate photography. It's one of the difficult things that you have to deal with.
If somebody asks, then I'll go into it more, but otherwise I'll just go right by it.
Mark Morrow
How do you do white balance, Ron? How do you do it?
Ron Pepper
Saying one of us. Let's see. It's always changing, but I typically shoot auto, but I capture raw so I can change it. So, if I don't like what the camera did then I can just grab a hold of it myself and make the adjustments.
So, I'd grab a bracket. Well, first of all, white balance is not difficult when it's outside. So, if you're doing exterior, unless there's unusual conditions, just it's fine. You can just use auto or choose sunlight.
Rob Moroto
Choose daytime. Yeah.
Ron Pepper
Yeah. Dusk, maybe we can talk about later. Let's say you have an interior with the sun coming in significant amount, and you have manmade lights on... I guess, in this instance, I turned them off.
If you have the manmade lights on, then it's going to mix the sources of light, the kinds of light sources. So, you can't really choose. You have to choose one or the other mode. You know what? Let me...
Mark Morrow
I'm curious to see how you do this, man, because I've been making just one of each, one of whatever I need and just mask it in wherever I need it, you know? So, I'm curious to see what you do here.
Ron Pepper
Well, one of each in which area?
Mark Morrow
I would white balance one for the incandescent and then white balance the other for the outside, like the daylight probably or try that at least and then mask them in manually. Make one in Photomatix one way, make the other one the other way, and then bring them together on individual layers and just mask in the one where I need it.
If I have more of one than the other, then I'll obviously go with that one over the other one. But I'm curious to see though if there's something more subtle or simple that I'm overlooking here. I'm curious.
Ron Pepper
The normal way is I would choose the one that has the most influence. So, in a room like this one where there's a lot of windows, but most of the lights coming in from outside where I think it's probably just that ceiling light on. I don't know if there's any other ones.
Okay. So I've got this room with a lot of light on one side. This is a difficult spot for a real estate photographer, right? We've all seen that kind of thing. Right?
So, when there's a lot of light coming in from outside, then you want to use a white balance. You could just use the preset of daylight but you need to choose a right white balance for daylight. There's at least the one ceiling light on in this one. Let's turn that off.
So, what I want it to do here is select all of the ones from this particular room. I could select all of them from the entire shoot would be the same thing in this case and just go over and use the powers of Adobe and change this from, it would have been as shot before, and just change it to auto.
I found that Lightroom, it won't sync the exact white balance. It'll choose a different one for each one. So this one's at 5,000. This one's at 7,000.
So, it chooses a different white balance for each image. Then when I combine the images, I get pretty close the right colors. Then I can do very quick editing on anyone that there's a color cast of a little bit of blue coming in from the outside light, for instance.
And I can just do a quick, I just call it a paint job. Just do a really quick brush tool, either in the Photomatix step or in Lightroom step. I could run it even though again, like computers being taxed pretty hard. I'm not sure if it'll take really, really long time. So, I can...
Rob Moroto
Now, Mark, I just want to chime in here. If you're doing that where you're taking two shots or two variations and then you're masking one over the other and all that stuff, here's a really simple way that we used to do a long time ago, especially if you have a bright room.
Take this image and HDR twice. Do it once with the lights on. Do it once with the lights off. Then put them over each other, and take the one that has the lights off. You make that a color layer. As soon as you do that, all your colors are fine because it's only one light source.
Mark Morrow
Interesting.
Rob Moroto
The other one, because it has the lights on, it shows the luminosity of everything. Now you can actually see how the lighting would work, and you get the natural light. There's a little bit of a pain in the ass to do everything twice.
Mark Morrow
No, I hear you. It makes sense, though. I'll try that just for fun. That's interesting. I've never thought trying to do one without the lights and one with the lights. I automatically just turn the lights on.
Ron Pepper
I think there's one of those many answers to the question about lights on or off is find out which one works better in different situations. The one I had on before had a big skylight.
So, really you didn't even need the lights on inside. I think that's probably why they were off. But there is something visually positive to have the lights on. I think there's something that if the lamps are not on, it looks kind of odd to us.
Just like in a landscape shot, if your horizon is off just by a little bit, you don't really know why you don't like the picture, but it doesn't look right to you. I think that's the same kind of thing with lamps being on.
I like to keep them on, but sometimes it's just worth it to have them off because I've been fighting the different color temperatures all attacking my camera at once. I've been fighting that for years and years and sometimes it's better to turn them off.
Rob Moroto
We just did a big shoot where we had to do it a time lapse of a construction reno. When we're doing that, we looked at it and thought, "Okay, well we don't want to color correct every single one of these." So, we went around, and we actually changed out all the bulbs in the entire place to daytime LEDs.
We got the brightest daytime LEDs that we could find so that we're almost overpowering the sunlight coming from the windows and set everything from there. The nice thing is for that one we used a Fuji X-T2, which has a iOS-less sensor, which essentially means that it's a fantastic camera.
Let's say you shoot at an ISO of 800, and you look in the back of the camera and it's black or completely white. In Lightroom it's kept all the information in there.
So, you can just pull it right back down and see all the data in it. It's fantastic. It has a huge dynamic range and fantastic. So, we did that and it was great. Just white bulbs all around, matched them all. Then we did the time laps, and came out great.
Ron Pepper
I just combined that bedroom that I was showing you before, and it doesn't have too much color cast. I would just say, there's some kind of blue cast on the floor. There's some wood flooring. That light looks really yellow to me, but that's about it. And frankly, for real estate photos, depending how much you're charging, I might not worry about that.
Mark Morrow
Any client I've ever had would be thrilled with that.
Jeff Lutz
That's a nice photo.
Mark Morrow
For most MLS needs.
Ron Pepper
Yeah, for MLS. But there are a couple of options you can do. Right at this step, there's a brush that we can play with to change the temperature. So, I could just make the brush bigger and I can just brush it out. Oops, I missed a spot, but just brush it out right there.
I could also just go ahead and take this. Let's say I am going to work on it some more. Let's say this is 90% done. I could do the rest of that 10% here or in Lightroom and paint out those. I'm going to finish it here so that I can finish that little workflow I was playing with recently.
I had somebody from the Photomatix support that was asking you about this exact question. His shots, they had a lot of different colors of paint and everything in the room. It was a really tough one.
So, I asked him to send them to me, and I was using those to experiment. So, I was playing around with a little bit different workflow.
Mark Morrow
That's nice, man. That was a good result. Good example.
Ron Pepper
Now that it's back here, and I haven't done this with this image before. But what if I just go auto white balance here again? And went a little too much green for me.
Rob Moroto
Now, Ron, I've been teaching a bunch of courses up in Calgary about real estate photography. When we get into images like this, the tricks that we say are, do something once and make it a preset.
Because every time you create something like that, then all you have to do would be grab all the images, add one preset, and it applies it to everything which saves you a whole ton of time.
The one that we do for the orange lights here is we just go into the HSL sliders, the hue, saturation, and luminance sliders, and we think about what light is.
So, with the light, why is it orange? It's orange because it's an incandescent light that's burning. Okay. So if we know that it's going to be orange, if it's burning that means it's going to be brighter. What Photomatix designs is it actually just made it darker.
So, if we want to get rid of the color cast from something that's orange, why not just make it brighter again? So, in the HSL, we actually don't take down the saturation, but instead we turn it around and we increase the luminances of the yellows and oranges.
And what we find when we do that, you all of a sudden brighten up the room where the lights are plus that color slowly starts going away.
Mark Morrow
You opening up a HSL layer in Photoshop and I'll make these, I'll batch all these through, and then they'll all have the same problem. So I'll bring them all through and then just do the same. That's the simplest fix for an orange light that I've found.
And sometimes I don't want it to affect everything else. I want the richness in the floor. I want the richness in this or that. So you just only want it in the light source.
And so I'll use gradient fades away from the center of that light fixture just to make it not so obvious or whatever, but either way, either adjustment that you've made with this, Ron looks good. That looks nice and natural and even and clean.
Ron Pepper
Yeah, I still did after Rob's, I don't want to call it a trick, after Rob's move, after his aikido. I went to saturation and I still brought it down a little bit. And I like it, especially for this one, because then it also had a nice impact on the ceiling I thought.
Mark Morrow
Yeah, yep, it did. Yeah, that's a nice even light. And frankly the light is a little yellow, so I try to keep it real now instead of trying to really fade it out, like I used to try to take it.
I'll drag that lum slider all the way up. And you know, I don't do that so much anymore. Most of the way, but not all the way anymore. Too, one of the key things that.
Mark Morrow
Jeff, one thing about someone just getting started in real estate photography, the people that I talk to, the things I tell them, when they asked me, "What does it take to get involved with it?"
The number one thing is really, there's just a few things to keep in mind. And mostly they have to do with shooting and how you shoot it. You want obviously your images to be better than theirs.
And in most cases, what I find, the single thing that a person needs to do in real estate photography to set their work apart immediately, is to shoot it straight. If you shoot it straight, you will immediately separate your work from 95% of the people in the magazines, in your demographic.
I live in Roanoke, Virginia, which is a small town nestled in the mountains here in Southwestern, Virginia. We're about three hours South of Richmond. That's the largest populace probably we have. Northern Virginia up in D.C. obviously is extremely populated. A lot of competition up there in those regions and down here, I have a few companies, such as Rob's, that really run the market.
They have a great product. They have great established relationships for a long time with the realtors. I've come to appreciate myself, how much each realtor, not each realtor, but most good realtors really have on them.
They have dozens at any given time of properties that they're invested in that they're either paying landscapers, they're paying painters, they're paying people out of their own pockets. They have a lot invested. They get paid, but they have a lot invested. I've come to appreciate that about real estate agents.
They don't get paid until somebody buys the house and sometimes that can be awhile. And sometimes they have, again, dozens of these things on their hands that they themselves are personally vested in to see that it sells and they just really hope that it does.
And so a for a real estate photographer to come in and fleece them, for lack of a better terms, is something that they're sensitive to, the least in my market.
Rob Moroto
Oh yeah, it's true.
Mark Morrow
Yeah, the cat's out on that. They're sensitive to it. If you do really good work. Now I have friends that have said Mark, they were about to buy a house, they're a new family buying a home, first home.
The first house had excellent photos. We went in, the house didn't look anything really like the photos. Second house was junky photos. I mean, crooked, everything was just like, what is that? A picture of a countertop.
Went in the place beautiful, like this was our home. This was the home we were going to buy. It didn't look anything like the photos. So the photos can be deceiving in that way. They can be too good, if you know what I mean.
Jeff Lutz
Right.
Mark Morrow
They don't necessarily sell the property. And that's what a realtor is looking at. I mean, at least in the MLS level, not the high-end people who are trying to look for Twilight shots and really creative stuff and unique angles, they have the money to spend for this stuff.
Most realtors do not want to do that. It's very blue collar work. They would love to go in, they try all the time and they succeed nowadays with the AI features available in phones, I guess. I mean, they're able to actually shoot their own photographs somehow.
So I don't know, you know? It's become very difficult. For me, I stopped working with realtors in general. I just got it off of my plan in general.
Because I ended up spending way more time because I take really good value in my post-processing and in my work. But real estate photography doesn't want that. It doesn't want an artistic point of view.
If you can bring that to it and you can do it efficiently and effectively and charge the right price and everybody's comfortable with all of this, and you can strike the right medium, then power to you.
Ron Pepper
It's really important to do.
Mark Morrow
I mean, I over-process, I spend way too much time, over commit. I spend three hours at the job site, Rob, when I know I'm supposed to spend 45.
Rob Moroto
Yeah.
Mark Morrow
I'm not supposed to spend three hours at this place, but I get carried away. I don't even know how much time has gone by. I just look around and think, "Man, I probably should get of here." I mean, I've probably been here too long and you know, but I have 450 images, most of them batches, you know?
So, it's only one. There's only like a fraction of that many that I'm actually going to use. You know the deal, but - So, I'm that guy. And then I'll under price it. And I couldn't stay in business. I couldn't hang with the people that understand the business of this.
That's the key. But if you, yourself, Jeff, if you know a realtor or you can know a realtor.
You are a teacher. You have access to realtors. If you could just get one of them, if you can prove to yourself that you can shoot us a scene straight, what I'm saying is that an average residence, you have what, an eight foot ceiling?
Jeff Lutz
Right.
Mark Morrow
10 feet? Something like that? The first thing that becomes automatic when you walk into a room is to locate the vertical midpoint. That's the enemy of most photographers. They don't think about the vertical midpoint and they're shooting below it or above it and they have warping and they have issues.
Jeff Lutz
You're talking about realtors, right? Who are shooting their own?
Mark Morrow
I'm talking about... Yes. If they're shooting their own, they get in the corner. It's corner shot central.
I mean, they can shoot corners. That's all they do. They shoot corners.
Ron Pepper
From a high level tilted down and everything looks...
Mark Morrow
Yes. Get to a wall, Jeff.
In the scene and you will be immediately better than what you're seeing. If you can get to a wall, you don't have to, sometimes you can't. And if we're talking about like a small bathroom, that's like a half bath or something downstairs in a house, forget it.
I mean, take a picture of something and get out of there. But you don't even need it in the end. I mean, I haven't.
I did at first. I would cram all that stuff in there not knowing if I needed it or not, but I began to realize that the realtors themselves are like, "No, don't worry about that. Just give me the key stuff and anything that's square footage related."
Rob Moroto
Mark, I think you hit it right there.
Mark Morrow
Thank you.
Rob Moroto
We would say get the key stuff. The thing that we found, the biggest thing to the growth of our company, was the standardization of what our product was. And what I mean by that is, let's get a standardized shot list for every house. So you look at it and say, "Okay."
"Let's look at a kitchen." A kitchen can be shot. So any square space can be shot from the centers and then shot straight on. It can be shot from four corners. So you got other, four straight ons or four corners that you can shoot from.
And then we also have this one where we call it a "one third shot." So if you have a place that you can divide it up and say, "Okay, so one third of the way in from the corner."
And the reason the one third of the way you from the corner works is because people put a lot of stuff in the corners, whether it's a plant or a coat hanger or lamp. Things are always in the corner.
So we come in one third of the way from each corner. And that means now you've got eight spaces, eight places in a room that you can shoot. Once you know that, you all automatically see that you have 16 options to shoot in any space.
If you have that, then you got to look at how realtors and people look at photos online. They're on their phones and they're doing this. They're going to flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip.
Imagine music. Music has a rhythm. You have this sort of same kind of rhythm. Then you have the chorus. Then you come back and it's repetitive. And as humans, we're very used to that.
So when we're doing that with photos, if you have it as like straight on, straight on, straight on, corner, corner, corner, corner, corner, corner, corner, corner, all of a sudden, those straight ones don't feel like they match the rest of it.
But if you had like, straight on, straight on, corner, corner, corner, straight on, corner, corner, straight on, corner, corner, then you have that kind of rhythm.
And once you can create that kind of rhythm and create that kind of package, whenever somebody looks at it and flips through it, it feels natural. It feels normal. And that makes the entire package worth so much more.
So if you have 25 photos, maybe it is. It's a straight on, corner, corner detail, straight on, corner, corner detail, straight on, corner, corner detail. And you do that and standardize it and your package looks better. So everyone recognizes what they're going to get.
And, if you started growing your company like I have, it's easier to talk to your staff and say, "Here's the shot list. We need eight shots in the kitchen, four shots in the living room, three shots in the dining room, four shots for the master, two shots for the master on suite, one shot for every other bathroom, two shots for every other bedroom."
They've got it. They know it. And if they miss something, I'd say, you missed this.
Mark Morrow
If the client asks for it, then I'll do it. I have a DJI Osmo 4k steady cam. I have the Z-axis thing on it that takes out the... I've learned to use that thing pretty well. I use it all the time.
It's a serious workhorse. I mean outside of real estate photography, I mean, music videos, anything, documentaries, short, any little pieces, that require... It's a killer little piece.
I don't even know if they make them anymore to tell you the truth, but yeah, I do. If they require it, I will and would. People still call me, I still have a handful of realtors that like to work with me and so I'll work with them.
And if they call all the time, but I don't aggressively pursue that anymore. But there is a viable market there, if you can locate that right price point and the realtors that I worked with seem to love that $150 price point for MLS work.
And they'll call you back for another one and another one, another one. I mean, that price point will keep you busy, but I'm talking about just normal homes, you know, normal ranch homes. There's nothing to them. There's no real light to deal with. Like Ron just showed us the example.
Ron has a prolific amount of work and panoramic and HDR photography. I mean, you've shot a lot of interesting structures I'm sure where you live. We don't have a ton of that kind of stuff where I am. We have a lot of country homes and things like this that you can imagine, but it's very rural.
Rob Moroto
My favorite lenses are not the ones that I use and here's why. The lenses that we use for real estate photography, we've got three of them and we have a Sigma 12-24, and that goes on to a full frame sensor.
So we need the 12 millimeter because when we shoot, say a powder room and we needed to shoot it not in portrait mode, but in landscape mode because everything on MLS is in landscape. We need that 12 mil to shoot that bathroom so you can still see everything top and bottom. Now, that is the widest that we go.
The next one that we have is a 16-35, which is our standard go-to lens for all of our properties. Then we have the 24-240 and that's on Canon. And that is on a Canon the R series, the Canon RP, which is a fantastic little mirrorless version of the Canon stuff and it's good.
But those are what we use for general real estate. Now, in terms of my favorite lenses, I still love shooting with Fuji. And my favorite lens to this day, right now is a Fuji 56 1.2 mil. and it's just a dreamy lens.
Ron Pepper
Yeah, that's a rare one that you're not going to see very often. Now, realistically, people are asking about lenses, Rob, they want to get into it. They're probably going to get one.
Rob Moroto
If you're going to get one, you're probably going to want to get the most affordable one. And if you're on a Canon system, I don't really know Nikon, so I can't talk about Nikon.
Ron Pepper
I'll take that next.
Rob Moroto
Okay. So on a Canon system, I would say right now, the best that you could probably get is get into something like a... You know what, I would say, get a used 5D Mark III, or a used 6D.
. And get the 17-40 mil. That's a great lens for all round. You can use that where you shoot inside, you can shoot outside and you can't go wrong with that. So, just those two.
Ron Pepper
And Canon also has that 10-20.
Rob Moroto
Yeah. The 10-20 on the crop sensors, so, jeez, I haven't looked at crop sensors for ages now.
Mark Morrow
I like the Sigma 10-20. That's a $420 lens, Sigma 10-20 F4. You don't need anything more open than F4 at that width. You're going to be on a tripod.
And I shoot Sony myself. I use the 16-35. That's my workhorse and I don't know if you could see that, but it is ultra beat up.
And then at a 28 mil, I'll use a 28 mil on a... That stays fixed on that camera. As long as you shoot it straight.
Rob Moroto
It'll look great.
Mark Morrow
That's an Nikon. That's a NIKKOR lens. So, it's fixed wide open. I don't have an adapter on here like a Metabones that gives me pass through connectivity with the electronics.
So, it's fixed wide open. So it's not really my real estate lens, but it's wide enough. And I always like to shoot a wide angle anyway.
Ron Pepper
Well, every, every system has a lens that's going to be... Unless you have only really big properties. I come from San Francisco where I was shooting a lot of condos, very small spaces.
But you need and want something wide. So 10, 12, 14, 14 is probably the longest. You need something in that area. And then you also need something up to 35 or so for exteriors maybe, but that's very general, right? So...
The thing to do is, especially if you're starting, so I've been doing this for a while. I have the Nikon Holy Trinity.
So I have all the focal lengths with very good quality lenses that I need. Same thing, I have an Olympus set up and everyone who has every kind of setup, they're going to have options of inexpensive lenses that are very much more than good enough.
Ron Pepper
Very good. So I think Mark brought up, you don't have to look for the F 2.8 or 1.2 lenses, get that F4 or more lens, because those are going to be a lot less expensive and you never need wide open apertures anyway.
Now those ones that have the wider apertures just tend to be the top glass. Yes.
Mark Morrow
Yeah, right, true.
Ron Pepper
That's fine. But with good post-processing, no one's ever going to know the difference.
Especially if I'm talking to MLS, so.
Mark Morrow
That's right. They won't notice.
Ron Pepper
Get a good kit lens that's wide, or maybe, especially if you can have one lens that you never have to change it, that's fantastic.
Just get one good lens and it can be on any system. Frankly, all the systems we mentioned are great and other ones as well, Panasonic.
There's no reason to stick with exactly one. So if you have an opportunity, like someone has lenses that you can use, a family member of friend, just go with that one and you'll be happy with any of them, believe me.
Mark Morrow
Absolutely.
Rob Moroto
Oh yeah. And the other thing is this, let's face it. You can shoot real estate with a 2.8. The thing is, as your f-stop... Well your aperture opens up. So you got a smaller, smaller aperture, so you've got a 1.8, 1.2 or something like that.
Rob Moroto
Thing is, more of the stuff in the background blurs. And I have clients who they say, "Well, we want it to look artsy like this one," and then you shoot it at say [F]5.6.
And you get a little bit of the background blurry. They'll be like, "Oh, that's not a good picture. It's blurry back there." It's like, "Well, that's what you wanted"".
We say you shoot at F8 to around F13, somewhere in there, depending on what you need for the depth of field. But yeah. You never going to shoot anything that's less than that.
Mark Morrow
You know, when I started doing real estate photography, I had a friend hire me who was living elsewhere in another town. He had lived in this town and he had started a real estate photography business on the side.
He was charging $100 bucks a session or whatever. He said, "Hey, can you go shoot some properties for me?" He put a thing out, an ad out, and I responded to it.
I told him, "I'm an aspiring photographer. I take my work seriously." I was really into it. He said, "Okay, look, I'm going to send you the camera. "And just use the pop flash."
But he said, "We're not taking fixture images. We're not taking cut sheet images for fixtures and appliances. They're not selling the home really. So you don't need any of that stuff."
Again, we're talking about normal MLS here. So my first shoot I had a ton of shallow depth of field with my f/2 24 to 70. I would get a shallow depth of field of some fixture or something.
And he immediately said, "Yeah, we don't need any of that stuff." And, again, if you're going to use something like Photomatix on your images in the end...
I don't use Photomatix on images that... I might layer it in very subtly, but in a very selective location. But I'm going to try to keep my tone mapping out of my bokeh, my out-of-focus areas for the most part.
Rob Moroto
So for any photographer out there, there's one piece of advice I've got for you.
When you're starting out, definitely look at other people's work and learn from it. Aim high. Learn from it.
Once you start getting into it, you have to curve yourself and you have to look at it and build up your confidence in your own work. You've got this thing where it's like you aspire to be somebody.
You've reached the pinnacle. Get happy with that, and then wait until you have the mental capacity to want to learn and aspire again.
Because one of the things that happens, I see this all the time with photographers, is they get to the point where they're aspiring to get to a place, they plateau a little bit, but they still see people that are doing a whole lot better than they are.
And then they start doing this where it's like, "I'm never going to be good enough. I'm never going to be able to do this. Why are my shots so terrible?"
And then they start going down and then they quit because they're discouraged from it. Don't do that. You know what, take some time.
It's like turning off the TV and not reading the news for a bit. It's actually healthy for you. Get rid of that. Get happy with what you've got. Try and get better based on what you've already done, and find the things that you don't like about your images and fix those.
And then when you get to the point where you're really comfortable and you have that self confidence, then start looking at other people's stuff again and say, "Oh, now I want to learn how to become more like this. I really like this. I think I can get to that".
And aspire to go there again, but not constantly. Or else you will burn out your self confidence.
Ron Pepper
There's areas that you'll go through where you're improving. And then there's a time where you're going to be coasting and maybe even helping others, which makes you better.
Ron Pepper
Maybe I'll make my comment. There's a lot of overly criticizing things. We touched on it during the show, during this hour and a half now. You're shooting for certain purposes in certain places that they're going to be delivered and presented in scene.
So, we're not always going for perfection. Other times we're going for perfection. So you have to know what you're shooting for.
So, if you're out there participating in groups, Facebook groups or whatever, and the criticism is coming in, keep in mind that they might have a different outcome for their images. They might have a different bar, a different kind of a client.
So, just be ready to say, "Well, okay, hold on. Let's slow down. And what I'm doing is for this purpose and they're doing this for this purpose."
So, I just want to throw that out there for everybody getting started, that people are going to come in and somebody is going to tell you that everything sucks. Somebody. Well, it depends on what you're doing.
But if your client likes it, that's what you're doing. So, you don't have to shoot for that person that's criticizing. You don't even have to necessarily shoot for yourself.
I think there's an argument for when you should shoot for yourself, but your client wants something, get it to them. So just be ready to keep it all in perspective.
Mark Morrow
Those are excellent points, Ron. And all I was going to say was just to piggyback on Rob's statement.
As Scott Bourne would say, "Be brutal." You have to be absolutely brutal with yourself. Don't fall in love with your babies. That kind of thing.
If you want to get into photography for a living, then it's all the client and what they want. You have to get vision for that, get eyes for that.
As Ron was trying to elude to, you can't even shoot for yourself in some situations. It's, "What do they want?" And getting it to them to the best of the ability. So, learning how to understand what that is.
The photography world is full of prima donnas. The comments sections - I don't even read them. If people put up negative comments on my stuff, I just delete it.
Go get your own show, go get your own venues, say what you want. But, anything that I try to do is to try to help other people, spread other people, share positive things, things that might be useful to others.
I know I went through a lot of pitfalls and I made a lot of mistakes when it came to photography, I was interested in photography. I wanted to get better as a photographer. And again, you do have to aim high. You have to be brutal with yourself.
You do eventually have to get over yourself in that way. And you never really do. You have to be comfortable with the fact that you might not enjoy it anymore. In some situations, it might actually be a job.
Ron Pepper
It's not always an easy life being a photographer. And you're going to have to choose the times that you stick to what you thought you were going to stick to. And other times, you're just producing something for a client.
Mark Morrow
Exactly.
Ron Pepper
In that business, that's what they want.
Mark Morrow
Right. It's one thing to be able to shoot, it's another thing to be able to face the business monster that's looking at you.
These guys up here have a better handle on that than I do. And I would deflect anything in their direction on that because they have excellent advice on that. And everything Rob has said here has been spot on. It's very realistic in terms of how to approach real estate photography as a business.
And what you need to be aware of as you move into it and to develop the thick skin that you need to be able to break through the initial sensitivities, for lack of better term of these things and get comfortable as a shooter, get comfortable as a business person, which is something I'm still acclimating to myself.
I've been trying to do photography as a business for probably 10 years or something. 15, 10 to 15 years, and going through ups and downs and having successes and not being the consistent thing that I want it to be all the time.
But again, keep aiming high in terms of the business part of it. That's the part that we really have to understand and to not burn out, it can be overwhelming. It really can.
And to actually enjoy what you do, which needs to come through. It takes a certain type of persona to really just deal with these things. So it's a learning process for all of us.
For myself, I'm still learning how to navigate the business aspects of photography, because I want to give my work away. I need to sell it and I want to give it away. And that's a problem, always has been.
And so I have a day job. At the moment I go through waves and of course I would love to follow my passion and for it to work. We have three teenagers in our home and the focus can't always be on my desires in this department.
Ron Pepper
Dad doesn't typically come first in that kind of situation.
Mark Morrow
So yeah. I've tried to put myself in the best... tried to invest for success. And I know it's not about the gear. My goal has been to try to use lesser gear than my competition and outperform.
It's not a contest and I'm not in competition with anyone. I'd rather be friends, and work together. But I'd be liars if we didn't say that we weren't feeling our way through this and getting better with every little thing we learn from all kinds of photographers and how they do what they do. It's just phenomenal. It's a great thing right now.
Ron Pepper
One of the best parts about the business for me was always just to be involved and learning from each other, like bringing up the shows that we both attended. I haven't been doing that over the last couple of years and I really miss it because...
Mark Morrow
Same here.
Ron Pepper
And just being able to call up so and so because they're the expert in something and asks some advice. It's an amazing thing. And then I give back in my particular area of expertise and I just really love that.