Hollin Hills Mid-Century Modern Flip

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 AF-S DX @ 18mm, ISO 100, f/8, 1/15 sec.

Hollin Hills is a unique little community situated a little south of Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. It was one of the first planned communities to be constructed after World War II. It is comprised entirely of mid-century modern homes designed by Charles Goodman, so when I found out that I would have the opportunity to photograph one of these homes, I was ecstatic.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 AF-S DX @ 25mm, ISO 400, f/7.1, 1/30 sec.

We'll be looking again today at the work of house flipper extraordinaire, Teresa Bosch. The bones of the house are the same as they were half a century ago, but Teresa and her team did a beautiful job of remodeling the home. I won't go as in-depth with the process on this one, but I do want to point out a few things that I had to do in order to create these photos.

Take a look at the two living room photos above. One is the natural light shot, and the other is what it looked like once I added my lights to the scene. I used two large umbrellas outside, coming through the windows near the couch to camera right, which simply augmented the existing natural light. Then I scraped a gridded speedlight with a warming gel across the fireplace to bring out the definition in the fireplace and the stonework.

Nikon D200, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 Pro AT-X II @ 13mm, ISO 200, f/8, 1/13 sec.

In addition to the interior shots and the normal exteriors, I also did a twilight exterior shoot. On a house like this, it would really be a crime not to do a twilight shoot. The beauty of these homes is in their floor-to-ceiling windows and the houses just glow beautifully when the sun goes down.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 AF-S DX @ 29mm, ISO 100, f/8, 1 sec.

Twilight photos are fairly simple to make, but you have to be ready for the light when it is just right. That means a lot of running around to make sure that all of the interior and exterior lights are on, so that you can be ready during that 10-15 minute window when the natural light comes into balance with the home's light fixtures. The photo above was a crucial shot, because Teresa really wanted to show how the home's tower became illuminated at night. The two windows that you can see at the right (on either side of the chimney) are at the top of the hall bath (see below). Teresa's team put an LED strip up there in order to create a cool vibe at night, and it came through very nicely. The problem was the far left window which is above a hallway. Even with the hall light on, it wasn't bright enough to appear in the photo. In order to get that window to light up (as seen in the photo above), I put a speedlight in the hall with a warming gel. It was triggered via PocketWizard radio remotes (with their impressive 1600 ft. range).

Nikon D200, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 Pro AT-X II @ 13mm, ISO 400, f/8, 1/50 sec.

Twilight photos can really transform a house. Check out the daylight exterior shot below from a similar angle. The house looks nice enough, but you're at the mercy of some harsh shadows and the windows look uninviting.

Nikon D200, Nikon 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 AF-S DX @ 18mm, ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/60 sec.

I hope you've enjoyed the photos of this house as much as I enjoyed shooting it. Be sure to keep an eye out for more house flips from Teresa in the future. Her work is stunning!

Arlington Duplex Flip

Nikon D200, Tokina 11-16mm @ 11mm (approx. 16mm full frame), ISO 400, f/8, 4/10 sec.

This is now the second house flip I've photographed for Teresa Bosch and company at Bosch Homes, LLC. They redesign, remodel, stage, and then sell the houses they work on. Teresa's work is excellent and I always find myself wanting different elements of the homes she works on in my own home. You can see what I mean in the photos.

As Teresa's end goal was to sell the home, I shot the photos with a real estate mindset. Wide, bright, and cheery. There were some definite challenges on this shoot, so I'd like to go into the process behind a couple of the photos I made for her.

At the top of this post is a version of the photo below that I made for my portfolio. You'll notice that the photo above is cropped tighter, has a little less color cast, and is missing the wires, ceiling fan pull cord, wall vents, and switch plates. You don't want stuff like that cluttering up your portfolio shots, but you can't do that sort of thing with a real estate photo, which is why I left it all in the shot below. It's also not cropped so as to make the space feel even bigger.

Classic real estate photography: wide, bright, and inviting. "Buy me."

One of the major challenges I faced during this shoot was the available ambient light outside. We weren't able to shoot the house until 4 pm, and it was close to 5 by the time I got to this room. Add in the rainy conditions and the fact that the days are getting shorter, and you get a pretty poorly lit window exposure. It's usually a really easy thing to control because you can use shutter speed to control the window exposure, and then add flash to illuminate the interior.

I did that here, but it starts to become an issue when you want light fixtures turned on in the house. To bring up a dim window exposure, you then run the risk of severely blowing out your fixtures. In the photo above, you can see that I'm getting close to that danger zone, and although everything worked out, the fixtures were contributing to the exposure more than I wanted them to, hence the warm glow. I think the warmth is actually fairly inviting in this photo, but the color cast does bother me a bit. If I had all day to make this photo, I could have done all sorts of things to fix these issues, but in real estate photography sometimes you have to compromise.

Oh, and if you're wondering why I even bother using flash when I have the fixtures contributing ambient light, the unlit photo below should be enough proof!

The ambient-light exposure of the above photo.

I mentioned before that the bedroom photo was shot around 5 pm. Well, the final photos I took of the house were in the kitchen and I was pushing 6 pm by the time I got around to those. By that time, the ambient light outside had dropped considerably and things were looking downright dark.

Let's walk through the whole process of the kitchen photo from start to finish. Keep in mind that I want the light fixtures on, I want the window to look bright and cheery, and I want to light the rest of the room to improve the color, quality, and direction of the light. The first step is usually to expose for the window and let the light fixtures fall where they may. Well, with the ambient outside light as low as it was, it would have turned the light fixtures into nuclear orbs. So, I was forced to do the opposite and expose for the light fixtures, letting the window go dark. Even so, I had the light fixtures maybe a tad on the hot side.

Ambient light photo of the kitchen. Check out that window!

Is that a window, or is it a black hole? Hard to tell! Okay, next I add some speedlights to bring up the kitchen the way I want to see it and we get the photo below.

The black hole is now reflecting one of my speedlights. Don't worry, we'll deal with that soon.

Notice how the speedlights help to erase a lot of the color cast from the fixtures, but there's still a warm glow from them. They also bring up the exposure level of the room, as well as create some soft, flattering light. That's all great, but we still have a really weird vibe with that dark window. This is the time for some Photoshop magic. I had pretty much already decided to take a separate exposure with the light fixtures turned off. That way they wouldn't go nuclear and I'd have my bright, cheery window. Then all I needed to do was mask the window in using Photoshop. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's not that hard either. I wouldn't want to do it on all of the photos in a real estate shoot, but I had no choice here. I certainly wouldn't want to deliver the above photo to my client!

A window exposure with the light fixtures turned off.

In order to get the window exposure above, my shutter speed was 8 seconds. 8 seconds!!! Ridiculous... what's wrong with me, right? But hey, you play the cards you're dealt. By contrast, the exposure for the fixtures was 1/10 of a second. If I'm doing my math correctly, that's a bit over six stops of light difference between the light fixtures and the outside ambient light. In this case, the difference is night and day. Oof. Sorry.

The final image, after using Photoshop to mask in the window from the previous exposure.

A nice side benefit from masking in the window was that I got rid of that pesky speedlight reflection. I could have moved the speedlight a bit to get it to go away, but once I knew that I'd be masking in the window, I didn't need to worry about it! The final product is a photo that no one (except you, dear reader) would expect was taken at 6 pm on a rainy, overcast fall day.

I'll share one more photo with you before I sign off, and this one was perhaps made more possible by the fact that it was so dark outside. During the walk-through, my client mentioned that she might like a shot like this, but not to worry about it if I didn't have time. The thing is, do you think I'm going to let a photo go by that my client said she might like? Nope! The photo, below.

The kind of kitchen detail that I love to grab if I can.

This isn't your typical real estate photo, but as I mentioned in the last blog post, I think detail shots can really help to bring in potential buyers. Couldn't you imagine yourself in this kitchen, candles lit, pouring a glass of wine after a long day? Maybe sneaking a nice cheese out of that fridge?

Ambient light only. The third candle didn't like me, so I had to clone in the glow in Photoshop.

Check out the ambient grab above. I made several test shots with only ambient light to see which exposure would make the candles look best. The rest of the ambient light in the photo is coming from the window that we discussed in the previous kitchen photo. It contributes very little, allowing me to then shape the light with my speedlights. If it had been bright outside, a lot more light would have been coming from that window. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but having a nearly blank slate upon which to create my own light was a nice change of pace.

To Light Or Not To Light

One of my trusty old Nikon SB-26 speedlights.

That is the question. I'd wager that the vast majority of home sellers, buyers, and real estate agents have no idea that a secret war is being waged by real estate photographers on internet forums around the world.

Yes, war. And oh, what a nerdy war it is. The argument over whether to use natural light (including daylight and fixtures), artificial light (speedlights, hot lights, strobes), or HDR (High Dynamic Range).

Without getting too deep into this discussion (do a web search and you'll find plenty if you're interested), I thought we'd do a quick comparison of the techniques in our lab. Before we get started, I will say that my preference is to augment the existing light with speedlights. Yes, I am a lighting nerd, but it goes deeper than that and we'll get into it. Especially with real estate shots, I like to use my lighting to mimic the existing natural light in the scene, if conditions allow. This way, the light can appear as natural as possible, but with the control that natural light doesn't always provide. We'll of course be using our handy-dandy living room lab to help us observe these different approaches.

First off, a natural light approach. Arguably the easiest (and possibly most frustrating) way to do things is to let the light come to you. Natural light at its best is the best, hands-down, but you don't always get to pick it. And when you have to do a real estate shoot, you don't always get the time of day that you want. Plus, what about the weather? Clouds, rain, direct sun, off-color light being bounced in a window off a neighbor's puce-colored house? Yes, puce, not puke.

You don't get any control with natural light, so you're at the mercy of the time of day and the elements. Good luck!

Natural light can be beautiful, but incredibly frustrating.

The light in the photo above isn't bad at all. I was lucky to have no direct sunlight streaming in, so it creates a soft overall feeling inside the room. When shooting interiors with natural light, you'd better have one of two things: Lots of windows, or some pretty well-designed/positioned light fixtures. In this case, the windows provide plenty of light, and a decent quality of light at that. The problem is that you can't really control your window exposure, so you will almost never be able to see the scene outside (not that you always want that, but it's nice to have the option). The workaround is to shoot closer to dawn or dusk, neither of which are always convenient (if an option at all).

With a little bit of post-processing, we're able to pull off a pretty decent real estate shot. In the photo above, I pulled up the shadows, toned down the whites and highlights, and so you can have a natural light photo with decent dynamic range (and my camera is 10 years old!).

Next up, HDR, which is short for High Dynamic Range. The oft-abused, yet overly popular stepchild of the photography world, HDR has become incredibly popular with run-and-gun real estate photographers. And you can understand why:

It's quick (not much longer than taking a natural light shot). It's easy (software does the blending for you). It lets you compress those highlights and shadows so that a viewer can see all of the details.

The problem is that it gets abused. Do a quick Google search of HDR photography and you'll see what I mean. Garish colors, angelic haloes around objects, flat lighting. Weird, but oddly attractive to many people.

There is a process called hand-blending where a photographer goes through the HDR process by layering multiple images in Photoshop, and then selectively revealing the different exposures to create a well-crafted final image. It can take an hour or more to hand-blend one photo.

On the other hand, the majority of HDR in real estate photography is done by loading the multiple exposures into software and letting the software decide which parts of each photo to blend together. The results are not always very pretty, and control is not its strong suit.

An HDR image created in Lightroom from seven different exposures.

My HDR experiment went surprisingly well, actually. I took a 7-exposure bracket (one exposed "properly" and then three shots underexposed and three shots overexposed). Then, I selected them all in Lightroom and let the software do its magic. Lightroom exercised impressive control and created a not-all-that-garish photo; however, I had little control over the process.

My preferred method, lighting with flash, is all about control and that's why I love it. You're essentially creating two exposures in one, because the ambient portion of the exposure and the flash lit portion of the exposure are affected separately by the shutter speed. Therefore, you can have your windows and fixtures exposed where you want them, and then light the room with flash to create a well-balanced photo.

A single exposure lit with multiple off-camera flashes.

Just like HDR, it can be easy to abuse flash, so I have a few rules that I tend to follow when using flash for real estate photography. The first rule is that it has to look as much like natural light as possible. When I'm shooting creative portraits or even interior design, I can get much more creative with the light, but real estate photography has to look like the real thing. Prospective home buyers don't want to walk into a space and have it look nothing like it did in the photos!

I always try to have my flash come from the same direction as the natural light. In an ideal world, that means throwing some umbrellas outside of the windows to augment the natural daylight. Practically, I don't always have time for that, so it means bouncing a flash off of an area near the windows (but still out of sight of the camera). In the example above, my main flash was being bounced from the upper right corner of the photo (just out of view). It's not perfect, but it's close to that window in the photo and so the direction of the light seems logical. A second flash is being used as a very subtle kicker coming in from the hallway off to the left of the toy box. This mimics light that could be bouncing in from that hall (which has a couple of windows). My third flash is on the camera, being bounced into the ceiling. It's not really contributing to the exposure; rather, its role is to fire the other flashes through their optical slaves.

Sound complicated and expensive? Not really. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but it's easy to start with an on camera flash bounced into the ceiling and see where that takes you. As far as cost, it's easy to find old, used speedlights. My Nikon SB-26's with the optical slaves usually cost between 70 to 100 bucks. Cheap, as far as camera gear goes!

The Great Wide-Angle Lens Debate

My wide-angle lens: the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 Pro DX II. 35mm equivalent: 16.5-24mm.

Wide-angle lenses are to real estate photography as baseball bats are to baseball. You can't really play the game without them. But how wide do you need to go?

I shudder and die a little bit inside whenever I hear someone refer to the need for a fisheye lens for real estate photography. Usually these people are not photographers (thankfully) and have no idea what a fisheye lens actually does (Google fisheye lens if you don't know). Rather, they are confusing the term fisheye with wide-angle. While a fisheye lens is a wide-angle lens, extreme distortion is one of its defining characteristics, and that is definitely not something you want to see in real estate photography.

Real estate photographers actually use rectilinear wide-angle lenses. Good rectilinear lenses keep straight lines straight, and even the slight distortion they produce can be easily corrected with post-processing software.

The problem with the majority of real estate photographs is not that they are being shot with fisheye lenses. It's that they are being photographed too wide.

Now, is this the fault of the photographer or the real estate agent?

A lot of the time, it's both. Many in the industry think that wider is better. Show everything that you can possibly show in the space and make it look bigger than it is. It's probably the latter that is the culprit most of the time, and I get it. Many buyers are looking for a spacious place to call home and a lot of the time, you don't actually have a spacious home that you are trying to sell. So, ultra wide-angle photographs create the illusion of a larger space, and you can at least get potential buyers in the door.

There are at least three problems with this, both for the agent and for the compositionally-conscious photographer. The first problem is that you may get your potential buyer in the door but once they see that the space looks nothing like the photo, they may be done. I know I've certainly felt that way in the past.

The second problem is for the photographer trying to create great work. Showing every single inch of the room is not only unnecessary, but it leads to a stagnant composition.

The third problem is more subtle, but something that you'll notice right away in the comparison photos below. The first photo was shot at at 35mm equivalent of 21mm (14mm on my DX sensor camera), while the second photo was shot at the equivalent of 27mm (18mm on DX). Look at the couch and closest window. In the first shot, the couch almost looks like it's falling out of the picture, while the window appears wider than it should.

Now, that isn't lens distortion that you're seeing. That is perspective distortion. The wider the lens, the closer you have to be to your subject to show what you need to show. What happens when you move closer is that objects closer to you appear much closer in comparison to objects further away from you. When you go really wide, that relationship becomes distorted in appearance, leading to the phenomenon you see when flipping between the two photos.

You may have noticed that my 21mm shot above didn't appear distorted until compared to the 27mm shot. But go wider and you'll start to really notice this effect. That's why I try to use the longest focal length I can get away with. I'm still shooting wide-angle, but I'm not just parking myself as close as possible and zooming my lens all the way out (the Tokina can go to 11mm, which is the 35mm equivalent of 16.5mm).

So, what's the solution? You're a photographer trying to get work in this industry, but the agents you work with want wide, wide, wide. Compromise. Look, 24mm is pretty wide. 20mm is quite wide. 16mm? Super wide, but why? It's too much most of the time and lends to distortion. Most of the really great interior photographers out there are shooting the majority of their work between 20mm and 24mm. Interior design photos are often shot with even longer focal lengths, although that comparison is unfair because that's a different industry.

I'm not saying there isn't a time to go ultra wide. There is, but it's not the bread and butter real estate shots. Ease off the wide zoom. Create tighter, more polished compositions. Show what needs to be shown, but make the space look appropriate and inviting. People will come.