 |
||||||
| Helping sales professionals make the most of their online presentations! | ||||||
| TUTORIAL EXTRA - A COMMENT ON EQUIPMENT
Camera, Equipment & Software - What I use and why Probaby the main lesson of years in the yacht business was that you cannot back up far enough to get a whole stateroom in a photo without a trick up your sleeve. And that trick is a 'super wide angle' lens, which is great for use in real estate and I've also used it for photos of cars on crowded car lots. A comparison of a regular camera lens used in real estate: photo 1 (an owner's shot with a fancy camera but no wide angle lens) versus photo 2 (my wide angle) is show below... |
||||||
 |
||||||
|
The main impact is that much more of the vaulted ceilings are now in the shot, which adds interest as well as better depicting the large size of this room. |
||||||
 |
||||||
|
I'm aware that even fancier lenses are now available, that appear to bring in the sides of the photos to a 'corner' instead of the rounded look (and 'curved' pillars, etc.) that are unavoidable with my basic super wide. Additionally you'll need to expect some of the 'dark circle' effect you see below, and be ready to counteract it with cropping or other tools. Even after cropping a photo like the one below, you will still have much more content in the shot than a standard lens. Excellent for the 'sound byte' world of the internet... |
||||||
 |
||||||
| So the need to attach a lens means that a standard 'snapshot' camera won't work if you want these results. The lens I bought was only around $80 as I recall, bought off Ebay (a 'digital super wide' 0.45X AF plus 'adaptor tube'). But my camera is a Canon Powershot G5 which was pretty spendy at the time. Altogether, however, this 'outfit' is far less than the huge bags of gear I've seen some agents using. And they still post lousy photos if they're not taking the time to adjust the color, levels, tilt, etc. as shown in this tutorial!
Another piece of potentially spendy gear is the software. I use an older but full version of Adobe Photoshop, which was around $500 when I bought it years ago. However the 'home use' versions of photo edit software that have become available since then (including Adobe Photoshop Elements), have many of the exact same tools you see here in this tutorial. |
||||||