Now that you’ve allowed me to spend £1000 of your money on a smart SLR camera, it’s time to find out what the knobs and dials are for. We’re doing this so that you can develop a dynamic propertyfocused approach to your business. You’re an estate agent, an honourable profession that is really important to our economy – the housing market sneezes; the rest of the country catches a cold. You’re not a photographer. We photographers wear anoraks and suffer from halitosis and fallen arches. I don’t know an agent who’d be seen dead in an anorak.

My idea isn’t to turn you into a photographer but to share some basic information to enable you to market your properties more professionally – by taking photographs that do justice to your portfolio. You are your clients’ marketing department, good photography is an unavoidable part of the service that you need to provide. Good photographs are essential to the marketing process, but they don’t just happen by accident – at least not consistently; they require investment in time, equipment and some training.
You’ll need to concentrate on this part. 

KNOBS AND DIALS – WHAT ARE THEY FOR?

If some of your interior photos look like they’ve been Tangoed, or they’re duller than a country lane on a moonless winter’s night, or fuzzier than Basingstoke town centre after 14 pints of Old Peculiar, then you need to know about your camera’s knobs and dials. Knob-twiddling is partly what gets you great pictures – you just have to know which ones to twiddle and when. The great news is that with digital cameras you can twiddle to your heart’s delight – practice with all the settings and you won’t do any damage to the camera. Playing with your camera is something you can do at home without parental supervision; no matter how many photos you mess up, the only additional cost will be the electricity used to re-charge your camera’s battery.

Before you take any photos there are some decisions to make. You need to consider the subject of your photo. In this article we’re looking at photographing residential interiors and exteriors; the settings we’d use for these are very different to those we’d use, for example, to photograph a game of football or a face.

Most property photos look their best when they’re sharp all over. Conversely, sports photos and high-end portraits usually look best when their backgrounds are blurred so that the subject stands out against them. Look at the sports pages in your newspaper and you won’t often see football supporters filling the stands, you’ll usually see the footballer sharply defined against blobs of colour; the blur/blobs are properly called ‘bokeh’ (sounds a bit like something that South Africans chew) but they’re blurred images of possibly thousands of people.

The effect I’ve just described is known as ‘depth-of-field’. A shallow depth-of-field describes a sharp subject and blurred/ bokeh background, whilst a deep depth of field (everything in focus) describes the ideal for property photography – a photo that is sharp from everything that’s close to you, to everything that’s in the distance.
A deep depth-of-field is partly the result of a dial on your camera that controls the Aperture – the hole in your camera’s lens through which light travels before it passes through the shutter (more of this later), to hit the film or CCD. The CCD is the electronic version of film and it’s that which records the image before it’s sent through the camera’s processor to be stored onto the camera’s card.

So, the first thing to remember is that a large hole makes a shallow depth-of-field. A big aperture is therefore what you’d use for most sports photos and portraits.
Conversely, you’d need a small aperture for a greater depth-of-field. Or put another way, your best bet is to set your office SLR on Aperture Priority Mode (‘AV’ on most cameras), select F16 (which is a small aperture), and leave it there. Cake!

Now, if you rush off to use this setting for your interiors without reading further you’ll notice that far from appearing sharp, your interiors photos may look extremely fuzzy; that’s because with a small aperture in a darkish room, it’ll take a long time to deliver sufficient light to the CCD. With a small aperture your camera will select a very slow shutter speed, (the shutter opens so that light can expose the CCD, and then shuts). But it will be so slow that nobody would be able to hold the camera still for long enough; if you can’t hold the camera still then you’ll need a tripod so as to avoid what’s known as ‘camera shake’. Camera shake is a main cause of what we professional photographers know technically as, ‘blurry pictures’.

TRIPODS AND TWIDDLING

As an alternative to using a tripod you might get away with twiddling another camera dial called the ISO setting (International Organisation for Standardisation). If you’re old enough to remember film you might recall that you could (still can) buy it in different speeds. You’d buy 100 ASA film for use in sunny places, 200 ASA film (twice the speed, therefore the shutter would need to be open for only half the time), 400 ASA, twice as fast again and so on to 800 ASA and beyond. You can photograph in very dull conditions with very fast film. The downside is that the faster the speed of the film, the poorer the quality of the pictures – they look ‘grainy’.

ISO is the electronic equivalent of ASA. The higher the ISO, the less time you need to open your shutter, therefore the better the chance you have of hand-holding your camera without evidence of camera shake in your pictures; but as with film, the higher the ISO setting the poorer the picture quality – unless you buy a much dearer camera. Some of the new high-end camera models do a really good job on high ISO settings. Whoops, there goes another two or three grand.

You need to be aware of another setting, Exposure Compensation. You use this when you’re photographing toward a window. In these circumstances the camera will need to be told that its exposure meter is reading light from the window, which will be much brighter than that bouncing off of the walls. This will mean that the room will appear too dark in the photo unless you tell the camera to increase the exposure.

AVOIDING THE TANGO LOOK

Q: what makes your photos look like they’ve been Tangoed?
A: an incorrect White Balance.

White Balance is just another setting, available via a dial on the camera or sometimes hidden in a menu. You use it to tell the camera the lighting conditions under which you’re photographing. If you’re in a room lit by a bulb with little daylight, chances are that unless you change the White Balance setting, the whites in your room (ceiling, windows, doors etc) will look yellow or orange. You can use White Balance settings too, to improve your exteriors. The Cloudy setting is best used, unsurprisingly, when it’s cloudy. On a wintry day, you get a warmer look by using this setting than you’d get by using the Automatic White Balance setting or the Sunny setting.

Get your head around your camera’s settings in the same way a mechanic knows which spanners to use without having to think. Practice until taking a good photo becomes second-nature. Remember that good photography is an essential ingredient of professional estate agency. Without it you’re letting your clients and yourself down. You’re not properly using the tools of your trade when you point and snap; you’ll be relying on lady luck to make a picture that’ll have the best buyers and vendors beating a path to your door.

Of course, describing how to take photographs in a short article, is nigh impossible. There’s more to it than I’ve been able to write here and there’s no real substitute for hands-on training followed by lots of practice. Happily, help is at hand and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Email me with questions or to talk about training. JohnDurrant@doctor-photo.co.uk Next time, Tips and Tricks.