Lessons

Lesson Info

The Kitchen - Part 1

All right, welcome to our first live demonstration. And for this live demo, I wanted to take photos of the kitchen, which is generally one of the most important rooms, likely the most important room for any type of house real estate photography. So I wanted to talk about the entire process from beginning to end. I'm going to be taking a lot of different angles probably more than necessary, but I just want to show you all the different possibilities. Now, this room has a ton of natural light. So this is a room that might lend itself to being a great photo with that natural light style. So we're going to do that. We're going to show you the difference between taking bracketed photos. We're going to do the ambient style and then the flash flam bent style, we're going to do it all here. The first thing I want to know or want you to note is the settings I'm using. So I have my camera set on sort of a manual mode, but you would likely be on an aperture priority mode where you are locking dow...

n your aperture, which we're at an F eight I have my lens manually adjusted so that it's about uh for a little past seven or 8 ft or so and then it goes all the way to infinity. So everything's pretty much in focus. My iso is the lowest this camera goes, which is iso 160 then my shutter is just bouncing around depending on if I want it to be brighter or darker. So right now I'm going to set it to auto just to show you what's happening. And let me actually just take a video of this so you can kind of see. So on my camera, I also have my level set up. So here's my level, you can see that green line which means it's level. And then I also have this grid, you can kind of see the grid lines up and down, which are going to help me line up lines in my frame. Now, with my shutter speed set to automatically, I can bump up my exposure compensation and you can see that I have a specific dial here. A lot of cameras, it's just going to be in the menu itself, but as I increase that I can make it brighter. So this is perfect because it's automatically adjusting my shutter speed. Now, I might not necessarily want to keep it on auto if I am doing my combination of shots, my manual shots, my flash shots, my ambient shots, my natural light shots because I wanna perhaps lock down my shutter speed and lock down my exposure. But for just getting a naturally lit shot, something like this looks pretty good. I don't mind the overexposed background. So I'm just taking that shot just so you can kind of see and that's at a 1.3 2nd shutter. So really long to get all that light in because I'm shooting at, in raw, I'm go going to be able to bring up those shadows a bit, bring back the highlights a bit, although I don't even necessarily want the highlights to be brought down. I like that overblown. Look for this natural shot. Now, I want to go through and just take one bracketed shot as well. And in my settings, it does have an option for changing the settings to expose your brackets, one stop over one at zero and one stop under. And so when I hit this button, it's going to take three shots. Now, let me record that because it's pretty cool. You could actually see what's happening. So let's record. So it took three shots, which was pretty neat and you'll, I'll be in the post settings, uh, section of this class. I'll be going through these photos looking at the different combinations, what's better bracketed verse. Not for most of the rest of the shoot. I'm not going to be bracketing. Find that it's just a little bit too much work for myself. If you're just shooting in JPEG, I highly recommend bracketing. But if you're shooting in raw, I would say one is enough, especially when you're combining the single photo with the ambient lights and the flash, just shooting single photos in raw is perfect. So I'm gonna turn that back off to single shot as well. I didn't really talk about this angle. So this angle I chose first because we're seeing the entire kitchen, we're not getting a super highlight shot of some of the main features like the oven or the range, but it's an important shot to show sort of the layout of the entire kitchen. You do see the fridge, you see the the dishwasher you see in the distance, there's a coffee bar and a little breakfast nook, you see the range in the back. So this is an important angle. So now that we have that natural shot and what I wanna do too is I'm just gonna take a photo with my iphone and we'll compare the difference. So I'm basically getting the same angle. Now with this iphone, I do have the option for with two lenses for the one times and then the 0.5 angle which is a wider angle. So I'm trying to perfectly sort of match this up. Ok. So let's take that one photo. I think my lens was a little bit wider. So I could see the cabinets on the left and right in the other angle with my 12 millimeter Sam Yang here's the wide view, which is honestly a little bit too wide. I feel like I don't get to see the sort of the background gets pushed farther. You can kind of see that when I'm zoomed in quite a bit, even though I can, I can still see the left and right side, which I want versus this, I'm kinda pushed even further and we can compare and contrast those photos. So in the post section as well, I'm going to be going through the raw photos from my camera versus the raw photos from my phone, talking about the different capabilities of editing. So if you're interested in shooting with a smartphone, definitely check out that lesson. Now let's get back to taking photos with this camera. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on my remote which allows me to trigger my camera, which is good because I don't want to be touching this trigger when I'm taking the photo, even touching this, I can tell it kind of shakes the tripod a little bit. And even though we can line that up later in post, I just wanna make it easy, simple. I'm going to take photos by pressing a button on my phone and this will allow us to take the shots for our ambient shot with the ambient lights on and then also with our flash. All right. So now we can see on my screen that we have a shutter speed of a one half second, which is, that's how it's represented here. We have the F stop. It doesn't show it's an F eight and it doesn't show because this is a manual lens. It's a Sam Yang lens which doesn't provide that information to my camera. But I it has a dial on the front that I can see an F eight and then my iso 160. So what I'm going to do is now turn on our lights in here and just little things like notice how this little rug I'm not sure if you see it kind of pops up right there. I'm just gonna pull it just a little bit. So that's not pulling up. I wanna make sure it's kinda like centered in this walkway. I'm gonna turn on all the ambient lights in here. We got a bunch. These lights over here are a bit much. So I'm gonna, let's see if I bring down my shutter speed, something like that's looking pretty good. We have one more light that is the garbage disposal. There we go. So that's looking pretty good. This is a much different photo than the one we saw before, which was of the natural light, but it's going to work out pretty good. So we're at a 1/5 shutter speed and I'm just going to tap the button and take one photo. Quote the other thing too, with the lights on the exposure to the outside is a little bit better. It's not perfect but it's better. Now, I'm gonna take my flash shot, not moving my camera. I already have my trigger on which is good because I'm not going to even touch the camera here. I'm just turning on my flash. Now with the flash, I'm gonna have to take a couple test shots to see what power I want it. But right now I'm just going to aim it just up at the ceiling about like 2 3 ft away from the ceiling. I'm going to go at full power so we can see the difference. I'm not really worried about what it looks like on the ceiling. I'm worried about what it looks like when it casts light onto what's in our scene, the appliances, the countertops to highlight those, make those a little bit more contrasty. So here we go. Take this one photo. Cool. So I'm gonna do it from this other angle because I noticed that there was quite a bit of a reflection on the refrigerator. So I'm thinking if I shoot from this side and I can go over here, I just don't need to be in the frame. It's gonna look better. Nice. That looks pretty good. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to continue to move down this line. Now I'm going to sort of hop up on this countertop, hide myself. Another reason this remote trigger is great. I can see when I'm on the camera or not and shoot from over here with the flash. That is. So I'm about here. Don't wanna be in the frame. 123. It's pretty good. So you can see that it's totally blowing out the ceiling. I might have been a little bit too close to the ceiling. So let's do that one again, but it's highlighting the countertops. It's highlighting the appliances and everything over here. So I'm gonna do this is a long room. So I'm gonna do one from way over here and you see me in this one. So and of course, I can cut myself out of this as well in post so I can mask myself out if I want. So I'm just gonna do that one. So this one just gonna stand here because I wanna highlight that oven range really well cool and let's just take one more from over here way in the corner. Cool. So that looks pretty good. Now, what I'm going to do is since I'm over here, I'm going to get these window pulls. So I am going to actually be decreasing the shutter or increasing the shutter speed rather so that we are exposing for the outside and that's good. You don't need to do the flash. But what the flash does, it's going to help a lot when we are editing these photos later on and masking around things of the window frame and these window frames are kind of cl clean white light color, which is going to be super helpful. If there's curtains and things, it's a little bit harder, but it will still work. But let me just show you. So I'll take just for the sake of education, I'll take one photo over here just like this where we're exposing to the exterior. Now, the flash was on, but it was pointing this way. So it's not going to affect that photo. Now, I don't even like what's happening in the photo in the window that's on the right side of the frame. But I do like the green in the background and I'm just going to stand over here and point my flash right at the window. I'm going to be cut out of this part of the photo anyways, that was probably a bit bright. So I'm going to decrease my brightness back up just a little bit. There we go. Make sure I'm not in that reflection as well and that's looking pretty good for this angle. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move the cameras around to a different angle and uh walk through that different angle as well.