Here's something I thought I'd show for those interested in real estate photography. This is a recent house I shot near Northstar-At-Tahoe. The first picture is straight out of the camera, and the second picture has been fully edited. All adustments are done in photoshop via levels, cloning, curves, perspective corrections and so on.
It's been a busy week here, with eight, possibly nine shoots in five days. I'm still up in the air about that last one, hence the possibly, but without question, my life has basically been "eat, take pictures, eat, edit pictures, take pictures, eat, edit pictures, sleep" for the last few days. And more is on the way. Not that I'm complaining! It's good to stay busy and I'm doing what I love for a living. As always, I'm fooling around with new techniques in my real estate shooting. I've been doing a lot of work in the village at Northstar recently, mostly smaller rental properties, however they're quite often tougher than the bigger properties, given the tight quarters and copious amounts of 'stuff' everywhere! Regardless, if one thing is for certain, I am probably the best in the world at the game of "navigating a tripod with an enormous camera on top through small passageways without touching the walls." If this were an Olympic sport, I would have the gold medal.
So these images are a minimum of seven photgraphs combined into one. To put it simply, I'm exposing each frame differently, because our cameras can only capture so much of a difference between light and dark. I make a few exposures for the highlights, including the lights, windows, shiny things, and so on, and a few exposures for the shadows, such as behind doors, the ceilings, under couches and tables, etc, and I combine them all in Photoshop, masking out different parts of each photo, then going over and dodging and burning to bring it all together appropriately. I also use a flash in some cases to bring out specular highlights and to add contrast on leather, deep recesses in corners and behind doors, and on countertops to get some of that rock to shine and sparkle a bit more.
And lastly, in total contrast to all of the above, this shot was one single exposure with no flash or anything of that sort. There is about a 10 to 15 minute period at twilight where the intensity of the tungsten and fluorescent light on the inside of the house matches the intensity of the ambient light outside. Then it all just clicks, and all it really takes is one shot to get a great photo. The lights are a tad hot on the inside, and some people might point that out, but I feel that it really adds to the warmth and brightness of the scene. I also love the play between the blue and orange here. A favorite of mine, to be sure. (And a quick note on the title: there are dogs coming in this blog. Many, many dogs. Stay tuned...)
I recently returned from a whirlwind trip around northern California. The central coast, bay area, and northern Napa were all seen. Quite nice to get out of the mountains and see the ocean, although I don't think it went above 60 degrees until we were in Napa, and at that point it was oppressively hot. Got some nice images that aren't real estate for the first time in awhile, and it was refreshing to be able to shoot and not worry about converging verticals! So before I bore you with more drivel, here are a few of my favorite shots from my little vacation.
I've also been playing with new techniques in my architectural and real estate photography. Namely, blending HDR and flash together to bring out more natural colors and add contrast and specular highlights to the images which I feel gives them a much greater depth. I'll usually start with a three-shot bracket of +/-2 EV, and however many flash exposures I feel necessary (in different spots in the image) to bring out some more color and contrast. I then layer them all in photoshop and edit to my hearts content. Here are a few examples of what I end up with, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this technique compared to straight HDR or flash-only exposures. This particular image is six different shots taken with and without flash and composited together:
And this shot is four seperate shots composited together to get the final image.
The standard wide interior shots are only half of the battle to me. How many times have you gone to visit a property, an apartment, or a hotel and found out that the location is just not quite what you had expected? "Intimate, private backyard" might mean a fifty foot corridor between the rear deck and I-80, "trendy urban setting" could just be another polished phrase which translates to "parties until 4am on weekdays." I always make an effort to put the house into a setting with my photographs. While the interiors are certainly important, there must also be photos which tell the story of the exterior of the house. I oftentimes have seen real estate photographer's portfolios containing nothing but interiors. Why would you want to neglect such a large part of the home-buying decision in your portfolio?
Here are a few images from recent shoots in which I took note of an interesting setting that might play a very large role in influencing a home-buying or renting decision. Feel free to tell me if you think that they worked or didn't work.
A condo overlooking the village at Northstar-At-Tahoe:
Here is an exterior of an Old Greenwood home. The pin and green give the house, which is nestled in the woods behind, context and added value to anyone interested in golf, which is a large draw of the Old Greenwood area.
These last shots do not even have the actual property for sale in the photographs, but rather they are views from that property. However, they are such a strong draw to the property that I felt they needed to be included with the final submission to my clients. All of the feedback has been extremely positive. It is nice to be able to look out of those beautiful windows before showing up to view a home. Half of what you're going to see when you are in a home or rental is not the property itself, but the area surrounding it.
I recently shot Reno, NV-based band Courtesy Call in downtown Reno. A last minute location change meant all of my ideas were out the window and I was starting with a blank slate. But this isn't the time to mope, just gotta be like Yoda... "Do or do not, there is no try." We scouted a few rooftop locations until we found a nice spot with some good light bouncing around off the large glass casinos in the downtown area, and used that for headshots, which we pretty standard fare, sans one shot in the style of "The Best of Blondie" album cover. In and out in under an hour, and on to the meat and potatoes of the shoot, the band shots.
For this first shot I mounted the camera on the dashboard via ballhead and superclamp, and superclamped a flash to the cupholder in front. I stuffed another flash in a shoe on the floor near the second row of seats (plus I gained ten professionalism points for my high budget shoe-mount light stand) to bounce off the ceiling and fill up the car with light. I hid behind the last row of seats with a PocketWizard in hand and remotely fired the camera. f/13 gave me a nice slow shutter speed to blur the lights out the windows and add some motion to the car, while the flashes froze the action inside.
I told everyone to pretend they were in an airband, turned up the music to 11, and we went for a drive. I'm honestly quite surprised that we didn't get pulled over while driving down Virgina Street with strobes popping like mad (it looked like a disco in that car) and music blasting. The cops would have had fun with this one.
And as for the 'RENO' sign in the back window? A complete happy accident, but I think it's a nice touch.
Here are a few other shots from the night. My only real instruction from the band was being told that "we will not stand in front of a brick wall/fence/railroad track and cross our arms." No cliché band shots in sight, I'm happy to report. This shot was pretty standard. 15mm fisheye, ISO 1600, 1/13th of a second to get some motion blur. Contrast boost, vignette, some dodging and burning, and voila. We had a ton of fun all night, and I think it shows in the photos.
Always nice to see your work in print - so I thought I'd share these quick snaps with everyone. Here are a few exmamples of my work being used in brochures by a local high-end real estate agency. They look fantastic in person and the minimalistic presentation really shows off the houses quite well. To see more of these homes or to see more of my photos, head over to www.carrlong.com and have a poke around the "Featured Listings" section.
The background: I am assigned to shoot a recently refinished house, interiors and exteriors. Not a problem, as usual. I load up the car...cameras, tripods, light stands, monopod...mono-what? Why in God's name are you bringing a monopod to shoot a house? I've asked myself the same thing time and time again as I load up my car to go to this assignment. I've never used it, and I didn't know what i'd use it for. I arrive around six, and begin to shoot interiors. I sincerely hope that at this point, you are completely captivated by my thriller of a story. I finish up my interiors without any issues, and begin to set up and take a walk around the house, making sure all of the lights are on for exterior shots.
Perfect. We're lit up like the Taj Mahal and the light is just about to be the definition of balanced. Roughly 9pm, nice blues in the sky, the outdoor light matches the intensity of the light coming from the house. Aaaand click. I look at the LCD screen of my camera and for some reason, immediately see that I'm missing a baker's half-dozen (or so) worth of lights. I guess my eyes had adjusted to the ambient and not even noticed this at the moment until I saw it on the LCD. No lights on the exterior of the garage and none in the main entryway. A frantic search for these lights turned up nothing. I don't know if they were not yet connected to the electricity or my panicked head couldn't think straight.
This reads like such a cliffhanger, doesn't it?
I had about three minutes to either find the lights, or attempt to jury-rig something while the outdoor light dropped like a rock. I remembered my monopod that I always keep stashed in my car. Quickly set a remote flash up, got lucky and realized that one of my flashes already had a CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gel on it from my last shoot, and went back out, and made a quick exposure adjustment to compensate for the change in ambient. Aimed my flash-on-a-stick contraption where I guessed the lights would shine, and fired off four shots. One for the main entryway, and three garage lights. Four shots, with the flash in one hand and a remote in the other. Combined a total of five shots after the fact, and somehow, via either luck or skill (maybe a 90/10 split on that one) managed to get the shot before the light dropped too fast to save it.
The first shot here is the original, straight-out-of-the-camera, unprocessed shot where I noticed I was missing about half of my lights. Sure, I could have left them as they are, dodged and burned in photoshop, cloned some of them out - but that would quite frankly be cheating, and it would be obvious that something was missing. The third shot is the final shot - five exposures blended together (one ambient exposure, 4 flash shots, one on each dead light) and post processed to bring out some color, shadows and detail.
Quite a difference if I say so myself. And that is why I lug every piece of gear out to a shoot, my 23 year old back be damned.
Now, I realize that this shot isn't perfect. I was severely limited in my choice of angles by the tree on the right and the unseen giant Pine tree on my left, along with some scrub in there. The lights aren't precisely even, and the color temperatures are a bit off, but I am glad that I took the extra time to do this - I will have to say I think it looks a hell of a lot better than without those lights on.
And on a less-intense note, here are a few other recent shots that I've worked on over the past week. It's been a busy one, with a few 3:00 and 4:00AM nights thrown in, editing at full speed.
And (if you're still here!) here is a teaser of sorts. I'm in the middle of a personal self-portrait project to kill some time and get some fresh air when I can. This was fired with a remote in one hand as I skated, two flashes on opposite sides (one for rim light on me/lightin the bowl and one to illuminate the bowl camera right). Taken at around 10pm.
Ideally I'll have a set of four or five of these before the month is over.
It's by far the most over-photographed holiday in America, and I'm sure the internet is brought to its knees and begs for mercy in the subsequent days with all of the 4th of July photos that are uploaded. But for some unexplainable reason I felt the need to drive up to Donner Pass to take a few shots while the fireworks went off over Donner Lake and add to the mess hereby known as "fireworks photograph week". I actually really liked the view from up there; it's not so bad huh?. I hiked down off of the road about five minutes to the top of the cliff that you see and probably (in my opinion) had the best seat in the house.
And then of course sat in traffic for 45 minutes once I got back down into the valley. Gave me a good opportunity to chimp, I suppose.
I was tipped off that there was a good moon over the lake last night. Grabbed the camera and tripod, and went around to a few locations trying to get some good shots (our moon, by the way, is just out of the frame, camera left, illuminating everything in the scene). What was supposed to be a ten minute trip to the lake turned into about a two hour trip once I just started sitting there, clicking away. Each exposure was about 15 minutes or so, and after the second or third one, it went from a pretty night to an "okay, I'm cold...just one more" type of night. But I will say that the introvert in me enjoyed the absolute emptiness for a couple of hours. I didn't see a soul all night, and it was eerily quiet. Good to clear the head.
1,014 seconds, f7.1, ISO 400. Try it some day!
I was recently directed to a New York Times article that appeared this week, which discussed the importance of quality photography with regards to to the real estate and rental market. The article touches on a number of great points, including the amount of time that goes into a shoot, planning, execution, editing and delivery. Well worth a read if you are involved in realty or photography in any way.
Click here to read the article.
