How to get night time shots like the examples posted

[cycosis]

Im wondering if someone here can give me some insight into the examples posted below. What type of equipment do you think would be required? What type of lens? What camera settings? Do you feel these images are heavily edited after being taken? Any resources you could recommend for this style of photography? We are looking to do more in house photography of completed projects and are looking for direction to replicate the below capture quality. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[C4S]

Tripod, black card ... ( I am old school .. )

[Brent.ff]

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Do you feel these images are heavily edited after being taken?

Absolutely...like all the HDR you see on the realtor sites now

[rage2]

Google Pixel HDR+ mode gets pretty close if you want to keep it simple. On iPhones, Lightroom CC's HDR mode does the same thing.

Otherwise, HDR, or long exposure low ISO RAW shot, crank up the shadows, kill the highlights for the same effect.

[BerserkerCatSplat]

There's absolutely some exposure balancing (ie HDR) going on, but another really key thing here is the photos are being taken at early dusk to balance the brightness of the ambient lighting with the interior lighting. That way the interior is well exposed, the sky isn't blown out, and you just need to bring up some shadows to balance them out.

[Mitsu3000gt]

The most important thing to mention is you have about a 15-30 minute window after the sun goes down to nail that type of shot, or you have to wait until the next day. Those are "twilight" photos where the outside light begins to match the intensity of the inside light, just after the sun drops below the horizon but obviously before it gets too dark. With a white balance properly set for the rest of the landscape or indoor scene, the windows or the sky will appear that nice deep blue, or sometimes even purple/pink depending on what the sunset is like. It's also easier to do indoor photos at this time, because you don't have multiple light temperatures to balance.

A long low-ISO exposure will get you close (can easily be ~30 seconds per exposure), but you need to stack and blend multiple exposures like that to make them look best.

That first image is pretty bad, it looks like it may be just a smartphone pic. I don't think that is an HDR or anything that has been processed at all. It is a longer exposure or slow shutter speed though because you can see where they decided to shoot right through a plant blowing in the wind lol.

The second image is much better, way more natural looking and generally what you want to achieve. It's probably around 3 blended exposures, or a well edited single image from a camera with very good dynamic range. I would guess it's an HDR/blend still.

The third image is harder to tell, but probably a more generic HDR based on the over-saturated unrealistic color casts.

Equipment wise, it depends. The lens doesn't have anything to do with this 'effect', but generally the wider the better for real estate. You need a tripod, remote, and a way to level the camera precisely - if it's not level, all your straight lines will be messed up.

Camera wise, if you want to try get that look out of a single exposure you need something with excellent dynamic range, such as many modern DSLRs. Multiple blended images almost always look better though. You want something that can bracket exposures as well.

Processing wise, there is lots of HDR software available (Photoshop, Aurora, Photomatix, etc.), but most of it does not look natural for real estate. I blend all my real estate photos manually but some people just feed them through batch processes with generic settings and get passable results. A long exposure, low ISO shot might get you close to that depending on the exact light, but either way you will need to be processing it in something like Photoshop. You will also want to correct for lens distortion, any perspective distortion, chromatic aberration, tweak white balance, etc.

What I can also tell you, is that Real Estate photography is highly competitive in Calgary and not at all lucrative unless you have a large scale operation going - so you may find it's cheaper than you think to just pay someone to do it when you need it, rather than buy a bunch of gear and put in all the time to learn how to do it properly. If you want to learn how to do it yourself though, feel free to reach out if you end up diving in.

[cycosis]

Long exposure seems to be a recurring suggestion. From a total newb standpoint, what does the long exposure do?

[Brent.ff]

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Long exposure seems to be a recurring suggestion. From a total newb standpoint, what does the long exposure do?

pulls more light, which is needed in lower light (i.e., dusk)

To put HDR super simple, its 3 exposures combined into one, so you get the dark, average, and bright exposures combined into one, so it shows a lot greater range (HDR - High Dynamic Range)

[Mitsu3000gt]

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Long exposure seems to be a recurring suggestion. From a total newb standpoint, what does the long exposure do?

It lets you get a properly exposed image with an ISO and aperture combination that would be way too dark otherwise given the available light. A long exposure is just a really slow shutter speed. The exposure is long because you are typically using base ISO and a small aperture (probably F8 or F11) in twilight hours.

The technical reason you want to use base ISO is because that is the ISO where your camera can use the full well capacity of its sensor and therefore also produces the most dynamic range and least amount of noise. That's how you get those really smooth color tones and deep, rich looking colors. It takes a long time for your sensor to become saturated with photons at base ISO in really low light, hence the long exposure requirement.

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pulls more light, which is needed in lower light (i.e., dusk)

To put HDR super simple, its 3 exposures combined into one, so you get the dark, average, and bright exposures combined into one, so it shows a lot greater range (HDR - High Dynamic Range)

The amount of light the sensor sees is actually the same at any given equivalent exposure, it's what the sensor does with that light at various ISOs that's important and why you would want to use a low ISO in this case. With that same exposure at a higher ISO, the sensor becomes saturated much quicker and you have a lot less information in your image, even though it is seeing the exact same amount of light.

[rage2]

You don't need 3 exposures to do HDR on a DSLR. I've been doing it forever by using low ISO and long exposure and shooting RAW to collect enough data to allow post processing using shadows, highlights and gradient adjustments to bring it all out without losing details.





Both these are "HDR'd" through a single RAW at 100 ISO and long exposure.

edit - my favorite before/after example here: https://forums.beyond.ca/threads/373...55#post4166155

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Attachment 82251

[Mitsu3000gt]

You need multiple exposures to do a really good job on a real estate shoot - especially indoors with sun coming through windows, you will need multiple exposures if you want to see outside. You can expose for the windows and lift shadows, but the image will look flat and dull after that big of a shadow lift - especially with how bright people like their photos to look. There are also very few cameras on the market that can even handle a 4-5 stop lift without looking horrible. I don't think there are very many people shooting houses without at least batch-blending exposures in enfuse. If you want to get a more subtle HDR effect like you have there, absolutely you can do it with a single exposure and the highlight/shadow sliders, but anything with major brightness variations you would need to be using multiple exposures for best results.

[rage2]

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You need multiple exposures to do a really good job on a real estate shoot - especially indoors with sun coming through windows, you will need multiple exposures if you want to see outside. You can expose for the windows and lift shadows, but the image will look flat and dull after that big of a shadow lift - especially with how bright people like their photos to look. There are also very few cameras on the market that can even handle a 4-5 stop lift without looking horrible. I don't think there are very many people shooting houses without at least batch-blending exposures in enfuse. If you want to get a more subtle HDR effect like you have there, absolutely you can do it with a single exposure and the highlight/shadow sliders, but anything with major brightness variations you would need to be using multiple exposures for best results.

If you look at my example in the C63 thread, I exposed for the car and overexposed the "outside", and dropped exposure on the overexposed portion. I did note that I tried the other way as well, lifting the underexposed areas and it didn't work out, so you're right in that sense.

This before/after here:

[Mitsu3000gt]

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If you look at my example in the C63 thread, I exposed for the car and overexposed the "outside", and dropped exposure on the overexposed portion. I did note that I tried the other way as well, lifting the underexposed areas and it didn't work out, so you're right in that sense.

This before/after here:

So in that example you are simply limited to the highlight dynamic range of your camera's sensor, which is almost always going to give you less leeway than you have with the shadows (but you've seen what happens when you push shadows too far too). I can't really see how good the sky looks afterwards, but I will assume it is OK. The background in the original is definitely over exposed, but not too much, and something like that is usually recoverable or mostly recoverable. You can push it further depending on how much you care about the final results (I.e. you may not care if parts of a sky don't look perfect if your subject looks perfect), but typically you are only ever going to have 1-2 stops of recovery room in the highlights which would not be enough for a real estate shoot. Also, the more you push/recover a file, the worse your tones are going to get. There is no substitute for merging multiple exposures, but depending on your end goals, you can definitely make HDR-looking photos with a single exposure, you just have a much more limited range to play with. The single image 'HDR' is good for moving subjects, for example, because you aren't going to be able to bracket your action shots.

[blitz]

For the viewed size of real estate photos a single exposure at low ISO with a modern camera should be fine.

If you want to view or print them at large sizes, multiple exposures would be best.