All going well, we will be getting the keys to our new house today tomorrow. And while I’ll be planning on taking some photographs of it when we get all settled in and furnished up, a recent post on Strobist prompted me to post a photograph of our beloved apartment that we sold in February, and which I photographed for the marketing brochure.
Photographing an apartment to sell requires you to envisage what a potential buyer might wish to see in your apartment – all the time you are trying to tempt people to come and view it. They then offer you a ridiculously large sum of money for it. Then you hope they offer you a reasonable fraction of what you are asking for it.
You emphasize the good points in the photograph – and if possible you mask any of the negatives. In the living room of our apartment, one of the main selling points was its abundance of windows, which with the adjoining kitchen made the apartment triple-aspect. It was also a bigger room than some of the living rooms in other apartments on sale in the development. So we wanted a photograph of the room which emphasized these two features.
Getting the sense of space first was down to camera position, choice of lens, and a little cosmetic rearrangement of furniture and decluttering of “stuff”. I used a wide angle lens at 18mm to take in a sweeping view of the room, with the camera in the doorway so as to include all the windows in the shot, and to mimic the view the potential buyer would see if they visited the property. I put the camera at chest height to allow me have some of the ceiling and floor in the shot – I felt this added to the feeling of space, and avoided a shot which was looking down from a height. Finally, the table and chairs was moved a bit to the right, to give an uninterrupted view of the book case, and allow more of the floor to be visible in that part of the room. For later shots of the dining area from the kitchen, I would move the table the other way to achieve the same effect from a different angle.
The key way to emphasize the windows, and the light they provided for the room, was to shoot at the right time of day so that I could balance the ambient light outside with the fill flash I added inside. I also left the light over the kitchen table switched on, and was lucky that the light levels at the time of day allowed me to get a reasonably good exposure for all three lighting elements – outside light, added flash, and inside light fitting.
Setting up the exposure went like this. I chose my aperture first – I wanted as much of the room to be in focus as possible so I opted for a very small aperture of f/22 to enhance the depth of field. My ISO is fixed at 200 which is optimal for the camera unless I have reason to change it. I set my shutter speed to hold a reasonably good exposure outside, while keeping inside reasonably bright. This ended up at 0.8s which was long enough to require a tripod.
A quick test shot shows that outside and the indoor light are exposing well, but the room is a little dark still especially away from that window light, so I add some light from a flash held just off the camera to the left, and triggered via infrared using Nikon’s CLS system, with the pop up flash on the D300 acting as master to the slave flash. With a small aperture and a low ISO I needed lots of power from the flash to ensure the very very short burst of flash light would have a reasonable impact on lifting the shadows in the image – this ended up being 1/2 power. I found that out by trying 1/8 and 1/4 power first and checking the LCD screen.
All this took about 5 minutes, and I was ready to move onto the next photo of another room. Eventually the apartment did sell, leaving us hoping to get the keys for our new house any moment now. Or so they keep telling me.
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