Camera Settings for Real Estate Photography: A Guide for Beginners

Real estate photography is an essential aspect of the real estate business. The quality of the photos can make or break a potential sale. That's why it's important to get the camera settings right to ensure you're capturing the best possible photos. In this video, the focus is on camera settings for real estate photography.

To start with, the presenter emphasizes that there are many ways to shoot a property successfully. Once you get comfortable with the process, you can experiment and find the methods and settings that work best for you. But if you're new to the field, he recommends following the settings he'll be sharing in this video.

The first setting the presenter discusses is aperture. When shooting photos, they are typically in aperture priority mode, which means that the shutter speed and ISO are selected automatically. But their aperture setting is fixed at f/8. They have experimented with shooting real estate photos with a wide-angle lens at f/4 and f/2.8 but found that f/8 is a good sweet spot for most real estate shooting scenarios.

Next is the ISO setting. They like to keep their ISO set to auto with a range of 100 to 400. This means that the camera will automatically select the best ISO setting for each picture, but never go below ISO 100 or above ISO 400. They found that this range helps with not experiencing extremely long shutter speeds or a bunch of image noise in darker rooms.

When it comes to file format, they shoot with a compressed raw file format. This allows them to have a lot of flexibility during the editing process. There's a lot more data built into the raw images versus a JPEG. So that's why they shoot RAW. There isn't much of a difference between compressed and uncompressed raw, so they choose compressed raw because the image files are significantly smaller than uncompressed raw.

The presenter emphasizes the importance of using drive mode. They set their drive mode to continuous bracket mode, where the camera automatically shoots bracketed images. This means every time you hit the shutter button, it's going to shoot three consecutive shots, one at negative three, another one at zero, and another one at plus three. Shooting three images at negative three, zero, and plus three is extremely helpful when creating high dynamic range (HDR) images.

The white balance setting they use is auto. They found Sony's to be very accurate when selecting the appropriate white balance for any given image during the day. Twilight images will likely require more white balance adjustments.

Lastly, let's talk about focus settings. They set their Sony cameras to autofocus with a focus area set to Y. These cameras have excellent autofocus systems, and they rarely have any issues with their pictures being out of focus.

The presenter highly recommends saving your settings as a preset, so you don't have to worry about remembering all the settings. This makes it so much easier to train new people and produce consistent results.

In conclusion, getting the camera settings right is crucial in real estate photography. The presenter shared the settings they use, but there are many ways to shoot a property successfully. It's essential to experiment and find the methods and settings that work best for you. Whether you're a solo photographer or plan to scale your business, keeping it simple is the key to producing consistent results.