Camera Settings

Transcript

Transcript of the recorded lesson. Recorded 2023, reviewed 2026.

In this video I'll be talking about the camera settings that we currently use for real estate photography. To start I want to say there are many ways to shoot a property successfully. Once you get comfortable shooting properties, feel free to venture off and experiment and find methods and settings that work best for you. But if you're just getting started we recommend just following the settings that we'll go over in this video. Alright so let's get into the camera settings. So when we shoot photos we are typically shooting in aperture priority mode. That means that the shutter speed and ISO are selected automatically but our aperture setting is fixed.

We typically set our aperture to f8. We have tested out shooting real estate photos with a wide-angle lens at f4 and f2.8 and notice there wasn't a huge impact on the photo quality. However we found that f8 is a good sweet spot for most real estate shooting scenarios. Now let's move on to ISO. We like to keep our 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 go above ISO 400. We found that this range helps with not experiencing extremely long shutter speeds or a bunch of image noise in darker rooms.

So when you're shooting outside in the daytime the camera will usually select ISO 100 and when you're going indoors the camera will be closer to ISO 400. Having your ISO set to auto helps eliminate another variable that you might need to adjust from room to room. Next we set the file format. We shoot with file format compressed raw. This allows us 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 we shoot raw. We haven't seen much of a difference between compressed and uncompressed raw. So we choose compressed raw because the image files are significantly smaller than uncompressed raw.

If you're shooting photos in JPEG instead of raw some photo attributes will be more difficult to adjust. First off white balance. Native white balance data isn't stored in a JPEG image so you only have control over making the image cooler or warmer when editing. Having the native white balance information on the raw image allows you to change white balance while editing as if you were shooting that image at that particular white balance setting. There also isn't as much detail in the shadows and the highlights in a JPEG image. In real estate photography you often have to reduce highlights and increase shadows in order to produce a professional looking image.

This is easier to accomplish with raw images since they store a lot more data. Although JPEGs are significantly smaller in size they are highly compressed and do not have the same amount of data and editing flexibility of a raw image. Next let's talk about drive mode. We like to set our drive mode to continuous bracket mode. There are many options within bracket settings but we have found that the 3.0 EV 3 image bracket setting produces excellent results. In this mode the camera automatically shoots bracketed images which means every time you hit the shutter button it's going to shoot 3 consecutive shots. One at negative 3, another one at 0 and another one at plus 3.

Shooting 3 images at negative 3, 0 and plus 3 is extremely helpful when creating high dynamic range or HDR images. So at negative 3 we're going to get a lot more detail in the highlights. At 0 we're going to get a regular looking exposure and from the plus 3 image we're going to get a lot more detail in the shadows. So when taking all three of these images and blending them into a single HDR image it makes an image that has good dynamic range throughout in the highlights and the shadows. We'll go into more detail about the HDR editing process in the editing section of the course.

Now let's discuss white balance. The white balance setting that we use is auto. We found Sonys to be very accurate when selecting the appropriate white balance for any given image during the day. Twilight images will like to require more white balance adjustments. We'll go over that later in the editing section of the course. When shooting raw images and having your camera set to auto white balance you can always make white balance adjustments in the editing process. So don't worry so much about having the perfect white balance when you're shooting raw images. We'll also share some tips in the editing process to get a correct white balance.

Lastly let's talk about focus settings. Here at Lister Pros we set our Sony cameras to auto focus with the focus area set to wide. These cameras really have excellent auto focus systems and we rarely have any issues with our pictures being out of focus. Now depending on the camera that you're using the auto focus system will work differently. If your camera's auto focus isn't very good we recommend shooting in manual focus mode. Lastly we highly recommend saving your settings as a preset so you don't have to worry about remembering all these settings. We do this so that our team members can easily switch from shooting photos to video without worrying about always changing their settings.

These settings will give you a great place to start if you're new to the industry. We also like these settings because we have a big team and it makes it so much easier to train new people and produce consistent results. However if you plan on being a solo photographer feel free to go all out and shoot in manual mode if that's something that you're interested in. But if your goal is to scale your business and hire multiple team members we recommend keeping it simple. Alright guys that's going to do it for this video reach out if you have any questions. We'll see you guys on the next one.