Real estate photography snapshot: How to pick precisely the wrong camera
A recent issue of The Specialist, the official magazine of The Council of Residential Specialists, insists that “99 percent of home buyers say that photos are the most helpful feature on a Realtor’s web site.” I’m pretty much convinced that 47% of all statistics are made up on the spot, but I suppose that recalcitrant one percent is visually impaired or something.
Nevertheless, the article is a wonderful example of really bad advice. The two most important features in a camera to be used for everyday real estate work are a wide-angle lens and a fairly small image size:
Except for print reproduction, the best size for a real estate photo is 640 x 480 pixels — which is 0.3 megapixels. Ideally, your everyday camera should be able to produce that size image without post-processing. The photos on your web pages can be bigger than this, but not by much. If you try to load 20 images on a page, with each image weighing in at one megabyte or more, you’ll overtax most web browsers — well after you’ve overtaxed the patience of your audience.What you want from a lens is not a long zoom but the widest possible angle. Most digital cameras have their widest angle setting at 45 - 55mm, if the lens were on a 35mm film-camera equivalent. A few cameras get down to 38mm. This is inadequate. What you want is 28mm or less — with reservations.
The features camera-makers advertise, megapixels and zoom lenses, are mostly useless for taking photos of homes.
So what does The Specialist suggest you buy? Cameras with long zoom lenses and massively megapixelated images — just exactly the wrong cameras for real estate work.
Here are the four they suggest:
- Samsung Digimax S500, 35mm equivalent lens at its widest angle, but 640×480 pixel images at its smallest size.
- Kodak EasyShare C875, 37mm equivalent lens at its widest angle, 1200×900 pixel images at its smallest size.
- Nikon CoolPix S7c, 35mm equivalent lens at its widest angle, but 640×480 pixel images at its smallest size.
- Canon PowerShot G7, 35mm equivalent lens at its widest angle, but 640×480 pixel images at its smallest size.
In fact, these aren’t awful cameras. But there are others that are so much better for the task of real estate photography, that it would be foolish to buy cameras that are so obviously inadequate.
Here’s the best question, though: Why did they go to the trouble of writing an article about real estate cameras without researching which camera features matter to real estate photography? Why is print journalism dying? Because it deserves to.
July 3rd, 2008 at 7:35 pm
I have been looking into cameras. I am thinking about a DSLR, but that is a couple months off. Got to get some of the closings that the banks are holding closed.
Greg, currently, what cameras do you recommend for real estate use?