Exposing My Real Estate Photography Workflow 🤯 [So you can copy it]

on this video I'm going to be showing you guys my exact real estate photography workflow this is the same workflow that we've talked to all of our photographers for really the last like seven years and is responsible for literally tens of thousands of real estate shoots I'm gonna show you exactly how we do that so we're gonna talk about our interactions with the sellers how we actually shoot a little bit about composition and settings but more so the workflow so you can see that it really isn't that hard to be a real estate photographer and hopefully use what I teach you in this video immediately in your business or maybe it'll give you the confidence to start a business of your own because I think anybody can be a real estate photographer so this is actually my personal house so I'm gonna have to talk to you about the seller side of things but I'm going to show you everything else from start to finish including sending it to our editors and just anything I think of along the way and it should be a good video full of a lot of value so the first thing I'll say is we're in the service business so as a real estate photographer I think where a lot of people go wrong is they think that the photos they deliver in the videos or whatever else it is is like the majority of why people hire them and that's kind of true but I would argue that at least you know 50 of the battle is the service you provide to your clients because we're in the service industry right and so it starts with how we introduce ourselves to sellers of the home thing you'll learn is that the friendlier you are with your agents and then their sellers is the more your agent will trust you first of all they'll like you better they'll refer you more but they'll also start to trust you more meaning they don't show up to the shoot if they trust you and if an agent doesn't show up to the shoot you can get it done so much faster Jared who's filming this video is like fully agreeing with that because it's the best thing ever when nobody shows up so always introduce yourself nicely spend some time building rapport with the sellers and especially with your client make them feel comfortable this is probably your 150th time shooting a house but it's probably their first time having a photographer in to their house which is usually their private area so be accommodating be respectful build a relationship with them as much as you can and let's get the gear out and start shooting now as far as the gear that I'm using for this shoot goes this is the kit you'll see links below are full equipment kit this is the gear that our employees use kit there's also a budget kit so if you're just getting started absolutely do not wait to get started until you can afford this year start with what you have you'll see some stuff in the budget kit but if you have any camera really will work as long as you have a wide enough lens start with that let your clients pay for your upgrades as far as what I'm actually using goes this is the EOS RP the majority of our photographers use that but we also have the RP or excuse me the r floating around for video it's just a little bit better video camera we're using the Canon 16 to 35 F4 don't waste your money on a 2.8 for Real Estate we have an adapter to you know have the correct Mount type there we're shooting with the benro geared head this saves so much time once you start shooting more real estate like if you're shooting two three properties a day you definitely want to have something like this it allows you to dial in your verticals quickly as I'll show you and then we have slick tripod legs so that's the gear setup I'm using today but again whatever you have roll with that let's go inside and start shooting foreign before we even touch the camera obviously we've talked to the sellers we're going to go around and prepare the house so we start with turning all the lights on in the property and just straighten things up you'll know after a while of being a real estate photographer that some houses especially with like more colored walls look better with the lights off but if you do that to try to get better white balance your client every single time will call you and be like hey why are the lights off real estate agents just want the lights on so don't shoot with the lights off go around turn on every light unless it really is a nasty Color cast and straighten things up so obviously in this house there's a lot of lights that's kind of a long part sometimes but sometimes some of the things that we do to separate ourselves are things you wouldn't normally think of being your job as a real estate photographer so there's some Real Estate photographers that want all the lights on when they get there sure I'll take that but I'll also you know I'm perfectly happy to turn on the lights straightening things we always spend 10 to 15 minutes cleaning there's times when we didn't have a shoot you know the rest of the day or we had a big gap where I've spent an hour cleaning is that my job no but it helps my clients know that I've always got them covered and it really has done wonders for my business we've grown a big business much bigger than the other photographers who think it's not their job so get used to thinking things that are not your job are actually your job and you will have a better business I'm going to straighten stuff like pillows you'll find these are pretty much always knocked over and I keep my house pretty clean but usually you have to spend more time than this so I'll walk around and turn on all the lights we have most of them on now so I'm gonna start shooting looks like there's some up here that are off cool so we're going to start out here and one tip uh one more thing that I forgot that's always good is make sure the countertops are clean so stuff like this you can just hide that in the sink there's a menu right here I'm going to put that up now the house is pretty good those are little things that spending that time to take them out of the photos will make your clients like the photos a lot more and save you from doing edit requests which take a lot longer than moving something so if you're in doubt move it in person next thing we're going to do is actually get the camera up to start shooting now if the sellers were here one of the biggest tricks that you can do to make it so much faster is once you introduce yourself and you're ready to shoot say all right guys I'm ready to shoot if you could go to that side of the house in one of the bedrooms over there I'm going to start on this side and work my way back and we'll switch positions if you do that you will save so much time because what sellers will do is they'll be like here in your shot and be like hey am I in your shot yes you're in the shot it's a wide angle lens but they don't know that and so one of the best things you can do is just have that confidence to tell them go down there I'm gonna start on this side and you kind of when you get down there you switch with them and the thing is if they're in the room like this you're going to be shooting all these other rooms and you're going to see them through the door and you're going to have to be like can you move a little bit to the left don't do that it's horrible it takes a long time so move them somewhere this is your shoot so you want to be respectful to them and make sure you're accommodating but also they want to know what to do they don't want to be in your shot either so tell them what you want them to do usually if the agent's there they'll go down there with them and talk to them so that being said we're going to get the camera set up I have linked below a workshop that's an hour long that goes into the exact settings so I'm not going to recap all those for this video but what you should know is that we're shooting three brackets so what you'll see here these are three rackets that we shot from this shoot you can see there's an Overexposed a middle exposure and an underexposed photo we then take those photos and have them Blended in Photoshop to a final photo like you can see here so that's what we're doing here I'm gonna get all my camera settings set up over here turn on bracketing again watch that Workshop link to the bio if you want to learn that and we're going to start shooting make sure I'm zoomed all the way out for Real Estate you most of the time when I shoot 16 and I'm going to work through this house so I'm going to start with some farther away shots of the living room one more thing before I get started actually tripod height you want this to be about light switch level so waist level is about right light switch is however you want it you just don't want to be what a lot of photographers do wrong they first start is they bring this way up here or they don't even shoot with a tripod but either way they bring it way up to eye level and then they shoot down into the room so anyway that looks like this right so you can see the verticals are not good it kind of makes this v-shape what you want is the verticals to be like this see how that looks a lot better you have nice straight lines and so that's what this geared head helps us do there's no more v-shaped verticals it's just perfectly straight so I'm going to drop this tripod and start shooting I'm going to shoot some that are farther away from the room and then shoot into the room but I'm going to go ahead and do this in real time just to show you that this doesn't have to take very long and you'll see the photos here in a second okay I'll do a mixture of like straight on shots as you can see this one is and then some that are more like diagonal and angled into the room so there's those brackets there's the bright photo dark photo middle exposure I just kind of work my way around the room and you can see this really isn't a long process like a lot of people think you need to spend an hour and a half two hours in a shoot in a house like this this is about a four thousand square foot house it's probably going to take me at the max 30 minutes I mean maybe not including the prep time but if I took longer than 30 minutes shooting I've been way too careful with it it's just not going to give me any results so shot the living room I'm gonna turn around here the dining room get over here and get another angle for this one what I'm going to do let's raise the tripod a little bit so I'm not seeing a bunch of this table the goal here is to show the space itself but obviously how it connects with the house so there's those three photos grab another one here that shows the whole room in kitchen photos the rule of thumb is you want the tripod this is really the only room you move the tripod height and you want it high enough so you're not seeing the underside of the cabinet so you don't want to be looking up at the under the cabinet you want to be like level so you just see them like this so about this height is good in this kitchen okay oh shoot mess that one up actually got to get in the end though and again same concept I'm kind of moving between straight and horizontal angles or diagonal angles last one I'm going to grab is this way showing the whole great room here I'm going to go over here and grab this small bathroom oh front door shot never forget that one for front entry rather don't just shoot the door I'm gonna get one more front door shot that kind of shows where the front door enters into the house cool in this small bathroom sometimes with small bathrooms like this you want to incorporate the rest of the house into the shot so I could go in here and shoot the bathroom but I could also I'm going to drop my tripod back I could get a shot that shows how the bathroom connects to the house so I'm gonna do both of those that way if this is a real shoot the agent could pick now when you're shooting bathrooms you always want to make sure the toilet's close so turn on the light here make sure the toilet's closed and I can get a shot like this this bathroom has a window view in it so I think it's worth shooting like this but sometimes you get a really small one you just want to incorporate show how to incorporated into this space so we got that and go over here and we would normally shoot all these little bedrooms and bathrooms I'm just going to show you one set that way this video isn't years long but I'm gonna get the pool table room here I moved my camera height up just a little bit so I can see kind of the felt on the pool table you can see that even with talking you through this process it's not taking me very long so turning on the lights over here as I go because I haven't turned these on yet open the door that connects to the bathroom see if this lamp works it does this room is ready to go with rooms like this you always want to catch three walls not just two so you'll see in this photo when I take it you can see the wall with the window the wall with the dog pictures and the wall with the bathroom door done in here really only need one photo of a room like this toilet seat down roll up the toilet paper you can see I'm just being careful to catch what I want and obviously there's some towels here I'd move these if I was shooting this way but I want to see through to the shower so I'm actually just going to get this shot in here cool there's that photo and that's basically all we do for the inside I always start with the inside first because if I walk around outside and I step on something I don't want to track it in the house so I usually start with inside gives me a chance to get to know the sellers and then I move to the outside so we'll meet you out front alrighty so we're outside we have our camera set up for outside which is literally just changing the white balance to Sunny but you'll see that in the workshop link below so watch that after this video I'm gonna start taking photos we're at the front of the property so I'm gonna take some wide up shots get closer to the house as I move in just taking a bunch of photos you don't need to overshoot here we don't need 25 outside but somewhere in the range of 12 to 15 will be perfect for a house like this okay then I'll get some shots where I step off kind of to show the Landscaping there's a good angle here one shot that's always important to get is a front elevation shot so there's gonna be a shot where I'm basically straight on with the front door the front elevation it's an architectural term for how they draw the front so I'm actually going to zoom in a little bit on this one actually in this case it doesn't look that good here so I'm going to use some of these bushes it's kind of like a foreground thing there's too much driveway otherwise there's that shot I'm gonna get a shot kind of really wide that shows basically the entire property from this side and obviously this is a real shoot you'd want to move those trash cans in that car but I'm just gonna roll with it for now actually I don't really like this shot I'm gonna go over here cool and we're going to get something a little closer there's some like landscaping and stuff over here so I'll grab one over here cool that's we're gonna get in the front so I'll meet you in the back alrighty so in the backyard we're going to start on this porch it's the same thing as the front nothing really complicated you can shoot exterior shots handheld I just like to use the tripod because it makes for better angles you can be more careful with it but in place like this you can fold up your legs or you can even go handheld just make sure to stay still foreign it's good for up here again we only need to get like eight or so shots back here at the most this is a bigger property so it's taking us longer to shoot but you can see how this was like a simple house with just a normal backyard no pool would be like very easy and very quick to shoot this is a good shot because it shows the view and everything I try to maximize the amount of like hero shots the really good ones we get back here so foreign grab a shot of this little game area in the water tank here okay watch a cactus though alrighty that's all we need for the outside I'm gonna meet you back in the office where I'm going to show you how we send those photos to our editor and then how we deliver them to the client once they're back from the editor all right guys so at the end of the shoot or the end of the day really we upload all of the photos from the SD card to the computer send them to our editor literally just the Raw photos and then the next day we get them back ready to go we upload them in our system here go over to site summary and hit delivery and that is all we do to send the photos to our clients so it's a really easy back-end process there's not a lot of time involved I think one of the biggest mistakes that Real Estate photographers make is they spend a ton of time editing and a ton of time going back to the photos even if they did hire an editor none of that is worth it you got to get them delivered and move on to the next one that is my complete real estate photography workflow if you want to learn more about this or become a real estate photographer yourself I highly encourage you to check out my workshop linked below it's an hour long it's value packed and you're going to learn a ton so go watch that it's going to teach you the most important thing which is getting clients that's all for this video and I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Eli Jones

Views: 42,596

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Id: J0X0k09R2rY

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023