Real estate photographer in Belgium

As a real estate photographer in Belgium, I’m more often than not surprised at the appalling quality of photography on websites of real estate agents.  Here, in Belgium, most people are not interested in having their property photographed when they put it up for sale.  With a digital point and shoot you can do this yourself.

That, to me, is a rather strange approach.  When one looks at the budget that companies spend to advertise their goods, such as cereals, fine garments, canned fizz or any other consumable good, it is rather odd that people put their most valuable good for sale with images that try to scare you away from it, rather than have you come over to look at it in order to buy it.  But that’s just me, I guess.

However, there are clever people who see the value in good real estate photography.  Solicitor De Jonghe in Ostend, for example, who contacted me in order to photographer an Irish pub in Ostend (Celtic Ireland).  In a previous post I showed how I photographed the interior of the Irish pub.  But there are also hotel rooms part of the pub which needed to be photographed.

In architectural photography I will mostly all the time use my 24mm tilt-shift lens, a perspective control lens.  In fact, by using such a lens, one can control the verticals in an image so that vertical remain vertical (as it should do in architectture).

However, there are a few cases in which you need to look for an alternative plan, which was the case in the first hotel room we visited.  Due to the tight space, I was forced to using a 14-24mm lens to photograph the room from the angle I wanted.

In addition to that I had to use a couple of Nikon SB900 speedlights, in order to lighten up the room and control the shadow areas in the image.

By using speedlights you can create a warm atmosphere in the room.  This is how the horizontal setup looked without flash …

… and this is how it looked with the use of a few speedlights.

Hotel rooms generally have bathrooms.  Nesxt image is the image provided by the hotel ….

I have no idea what they wanted to accomplish with the previous photography, but attracting a huge crowd certainly wasn’t one of the possibilities.  So I re photographed the bathroom from a slightly different angle, including the sun peeping through the window.

By using a few flash lights in order to control the contrast, I lightened up this bathroom as follows

The flare, created by the sun shining straight into the lens, is something I personally didn’t object to in this image.

Shot vertically, this is what it looked like.

Lastly, we photographed the room from a totally different perspective.

By using flashlight we were able to create that warm atmosphere we’re after.

Lastly, there was a second room which needed to be photographed.  In this one, I used 3 speedlights.

In brief, I think that, by using a professional photographer, one is able to lift the feel of a place and certainly attract a clientèle that might not have come if the place was photographed in what I would call “the belgian way”.