Light, Bright Real Estate Photos Without Lighting

On my last shoot of a home in Issaquah, I tried a technique that is becoming popular with real estate photographers. It’s called High Dynamic Range (HDR for short) or Exposure Fusion. This technique allows you to produce interior photos that are light and bright without using any complicated lighting equipment. The way this works is you shoot a series of photos 2 stops in exposure apart and then use special software to combine the best parts of each into a single image.

The big benefit for real estate photographers is you don’t have to carry or setup any lighting equipment and thus can work faster and get results that are very close to what you’d get using lighting. The trade off is a little more time in front of a computer processing the photos. In the example images in the slide-show above I used a tripod to shoot seven photos (a series of 3 to 5 also works) each 2 stops from the last photo and combined them with Enfuse for Lightroom.

There are a number of software products that can be used to combine the photos:

• Enfuse for Lightroom
• Photomatix
• Bracketeer
• Enfuse GUI
• xFuse for the Mac

When doing this shoot, since it was the first time I’d used HDR processing, I shot both HDR exposures and flash like I have done in the past. But I ended up using the HDR images because I liked the way they looked.