Anyone here ever do real estate photography?

[Lamplight]

I just applied for a job taking pictures that would be used to create virtual tours of homes online and I was hoping maybe someone here had some experience with this sort of thing. Any tips on taking decent indoor pictures with bright light streaming through the windows? If I get this job I imagine it will be time to invest in a 550EX. Yep, that will be my excuse...

:D

[dn7elson]

You will definately want to have a good flash at your disposal. This will help to more evenly illuminate the interiors when you have light coming through a window. Even then you will need to expose for the room and not let the overpowering light from a sunlit window control the exposure.

The other thing that you will need is a wide angle lens. With digital camera and the multiplication/crop factors, you will find that you cannot get too wide a lens (ultra fisheye lens excluded :D ). Which camera you are planning to use will play into the total amount of this, but even with a full frame sensor, you will still want a good wide angle lens. It just becomes harder to get with a 1.6 factor.

Lastly, take lots of pictures, bracketing exposures until you start to get consistent images that meet your needs. I would also suggest that you shoot RAW as you can make up for a couple of stops of exposure during conversion that might make the difference between having a bad image and one that works.

[dtrayers]

Though I don't do real estate photography, these were taken of a house I recently sold:

http://tours.360house.com/viewer_kw.cfm?id=97603

I think the person who took them used a Nikon CoolPix 5000 with a wide angle adapter lens. She also had a Bogen panorama mount so the camera rotated around the nodal point of the lens. She didn't use any flash, but did expose for both the interior and the windows, then blended the windows in Photoshop. I have no idea what she used to make the 360s.

The panoramas of the front and back yard I took with a Canon G3 and used Panorama Factory. I gave the originals to the photographer and she re-stitched them in her software.

BTW, I think my realtor said the cost of this was $100US. Quite a lot of work for not much money, IMO.

[Lamplight]

Thanks for the information and advice, guys. :) I just applied for this job online last night, so I still don't know much about it. From my understanding I would just take the pictures and they have someone else to create the 3D views. Unless they provide a camera, I suppose I would be using my DRebel (or purchase a film camera of some sort), although I would probably have to invest in a much wider lens and of course a flash (which I want anyway :D). And if it only payed $50 per house I'd probably still do it because I loath my current job. :D