Flash
The purview of a photographer is what is in front of the lens. Photography is capturing light, it’s not what happens in the camera but how a photographer chooses to manage the technology that defines the photograph. Like a painter uses a paintbrush, a photographer makes the artistic and technical choices to capture light.
Commercially available digital cameras and the software to process those images have been around since 1989, they captured tiny 2-megapixel resolution images. Since we began shooting real estate in 2009 we have used 11 different model cameras! Every one of them was replace because of technology improvements. Today’s full frame digital cameras offer over 60 megapixels of resolution.
As technology improved so did processing software. Exposure blending, like HDR is an automated software solution that helped navigate the widely divergent range of light in homes, revolutionizing the real estate photography industry. It offered a fast and inexpensive method to capture images in a dark space without lugging around huge amounts of expensive lighting equipment and cabling required to connect lighting.
And again, technology changed everything. The wireless flash became commercially available in the early 2000s. This wireless connection offered freedom!
Here’s the problem, with any type of exposure blending like HDR. When you change the exposure, you are changing visually significant attributes of an image that define quality. You are changing: The color by the amount of light you are capturing, motion blur by changing how movement registers on the camera sensor, and the overall image sharpness. When you combine a perfectly exposed photograph with two or more not so perfectly exposed photographs with the hopes of improving the dynamic range of the image you do so at the sacrifice of quality.
As a test we sent several images to be process as an HDR, the best result is presented in the slider. Note that we got similar results from all the processors. As you can see from our samples digital processing dramatically impacted the images. The colors are not crisp and vibrant or even accurate to the actual color of the room. Whites bleed of into grey. Natural soft shadows were rendered with harsh lines or completely removed. The floor glare creates a distraction covering the natural wood tones of the floor. The detail of the marble backsplash is gone.