Real Estate Photography in Portugal : first assessment after my 3 first photo shoots
As I start my journey of becoming a real estate photographer in Portugal and Switzerland, I wanted to look back on my 3 first photo shoots : Pomar das Oliveiras near Sertã, Quinta Serena located between São Martinho do Porto and Alcobaça, and finally Casa Celeste located between Nazaré and Alcobaça.
Here are my favourite images for these 3 beautiful properties.
Interior photography, or real estate photography, requires different skills than wildlife photography, that is for sure. No need to wait for hours to see the subject and react in a blink of an eye to capture the decisive moment. In real estate photography, you have all the time you want to shoot a subject that will always be here and ready! It is still important to choose the right hour and day though, as weather will have a big impact on light, and so on how light comes in the property.
These first photo shoots gave me just a little bit of experience to realize that I need to improve 3 main things in order to go from an amateur to a professional real estate photographer:
GEAR : I need to invest in some gear:
Camera and lens : I rented both a camera body and a lens for these photo shoots, and now that I have been highly satisfied by the quality of the images, I need to buy my own gear for real estate photography. I am still hesitating between buying only a wide angle lens, so that I can put it on my crop sensor camera and keep this great Canon 7D Mark II as my only camera body, or buy both a new body, namely the mirrorless Canon EOS R6, and a Canon 15-35mm wide angle lens. But I know both options would work great.
Tripod : a good tripod seems quite compulsory for interior photography. First because it would allow me to shoot as slower shutter speeds. Thus, I would not not have to raise the ISO too much and the quality of the images would consequently be better. Second, I would be able to shoot multi exposure images.
HDR photography : I need to learn how to shoot and edit multi exposure images. Thus, I can create images where the both the interior and exterior can look great, instead of having plain white squares for the windows.
POST PROCESSING : Regarding post-processing, on top of learning how to merge the multi exposure images to create beautiful HDR images, I also need to improve the way I deal with distorsion, which is a major component when shooting with a very wide angle lens.
I cannot wait to shoot more properties and keep learning!
