Real Estate

Real estate photography is the most constrained of the commercial genres: the subject cannot be moved, the deadline is usually tomorrow, and the work is judged on how quickly the property sells. Nearly every technical habit of the field follows from those three pressures.

The defining tool is the wide-angle lens, typically somewhere between 16 and 24 millimeters, chosen not for drama but because rooms are small and a single frame has to convey floor plan as much as atmosphere. Wide lenses distort, so the field’s strictest convention is keeping vertical lines vertical — a tilted camera turns walls into trapezoids, and leaning verticals are the fastest way to make an interior look amateur. Tripods, bubble levels, and shift lenses earn their place in the kit for that reason alone.

Light from two directions

Interiors pose a problem portrait work rarely faces: the brightest thing in the frame is usually a window, many times brighter than the room around it. Photographers resolve it either by blending bracketed exposures in software or by lighting the room with flash until it sits within range of the window — and most working shooters now mix the two, a hybrid the trade calls “flambient.” The goal is a believable room where the view through the glass still reads, a balancing act the human eye performs automatically and a sensor cannot.

Exteriors run on their own clock. The standard establishing picture is made at twilight, during the ten or fifteen minutes when interior lamps and the fading sky reach equilibrium, because a lit house against deep blue dusk photographs warmer than the same house at noon. Drones added the elevated angle to the repertoire in the 2010s and changed how acreage and rooflines are shown, though in most countries those flights now require a license.