Nikon

One of the areas Transcribe Thames Group specialises in is providing solutions for Estate Agents property detail production. As well as providing advice about suitable copiers and printers to produce the details, we also advise on suitable digital cameras and how to use them (in fact, we helped Polaroid develop instant cameras for estate agency use). Over the years we have helped our customers avoid the many pitfalls than can easily be avoided. If you’re an estate agent and struggling with digital photography, then we hope you find this guide useful.

Composition

This part is down to the person taking the pictures and is fairly common sense, but you would be surprised how many dustbins and toys etc appear on the front of house details. My most successful estate agents pay great attention to this, when joint marketing properties the difference between one agents photo’s and another is incredible. Sometimes taking pictures from a low or high point or slightly to the side of a property can make all the difference.

Wide Angle lenses to enable capturing most of internal rooms and external shots with restricted distance. The camera should have a lens that is 28mm (in 35mm camera terms) or wider. (The smaller the number the wider the field of view).  Most cameras that have wide angle lenses specify it (in Traditional 35mm film camera equivalent terms) Unfortunately quite a lot of cameras, especially the new Digital SLR Cameras do not show the specification of the lens in 35mm equivalent terms so it is hard to compare like for like, for example the Canon EOS 350D lists a 18-55mm lens, but in 35mm terms this is actually 28.8mm to 88mm lens, and yes you can use some of your old lenses but multiply them by1.6x .

Photo shape!

Traditional 35mm film cameras usually used pictures that had an aspect ratio of 3:2 which are the same sort of shape as landscape A4 paper, some digital cameras take 4:3 shaped pictures that are the shape of most computer screens i.e a lot squarer. On many new cameras you can select either shape, but on quite a lot of the Digital SLR (removable lens cameras) you are stuck with one shape only. This could effect the layout of your details and mess up your templates, or web pages, obviously you can change your templates, but not if you are one office out of a group. This can be changed in software but is another step, so I would suggest you pick a suitable one.

Good Quality Photos

These days you should aim for a camera with 5M pixels or more, although these are often capable of capturing far higher resolution pictures than you need. But is not just the number of pixels that count but the quality of the lens and the camera.

Are your pictures too dark?

When cameras are used in their standard mode they are often set to average or evaluative metering. This often means then when about 1/3 of the picture is brightly lit sky that the actual house is very dark in the picture, look for a setting in the metering for either center weighted metering(or spot metering if you don’t have centre weighted) which takes all of its readings from the central area of the picture i.e the house, you could be amazed at the difference, alternatively use the exposure compensation + or – buttons to manually brighten the image whilst you are looking at the image on the back of your camera before you take the shot.

On internal photography, you will often be looking straight at a window at the end of the room so with the average metering on you will get pictures of dark rooms, so with centre weighted metering set look slightly away from the window in to the corner of the room, ½ depress the picture taking button, keeping the button in recompose your shot back facing the window and push the button all the way. I would also often use the flash in fill mode so that it fires regardless of light coming in through windows etc, but this is not suitable in all cases.

Ease of use

To enable you to market your properties to their full potential it is essential that the outside and the inside look spacious and inviting.

I wish I had a pound for everybody that visited our stand at PCS that had purchased a Digital SLR and said they had no idea how to work it.  Digital SLR cameras are capable of taking the best pictures but if you are not a keen photographer then you would probably take better pictures with a simpler camera..

Files Sizes

If you are printing details from Word for example and the front picture is about 6x4” then this does not need to be a huge 8 million pixel photo, try to resample it to the smallest file size you can before you lose print quality. Apart from freeing space on your PC this will also print much faster, this is particularly important if you have a lot of pictures per detail or  you produce lettings list with loads of pictures, just because you have made the picture look smaller in Word does not mean that the files size is any smaller. I am often asked why is this lettings list taking a long time to print, upon investigation I then find out the print job is spooling into hundreds of Megabytes because each picture is at full resolution even though they may only appear in the document as a two inch image.