Why Can “Flambient” Method Make Your Real Estate Photography Beautiful?

As the name suggests, it is a method of real estate photography that combines flash and ambient shots in photos. It is a new method but had the fastest growth thanks to its outstanding benefits. That’s is how most our clients apply if they want to highlight the best features of properties, adding color, contrast, and crispness into the images. The following post will collect a deeper understanding of this shooting method and how to succeed in it.

The Ambient Shot

This shot works on the natural light of the room, without any flash. You then can have an overall picture of the room thanks to the exposure in the middle. The ambient shots are often taken in RAW to push the bounds of the dynamic range.

In case of extreme dynamic range, you should take a bracket of 3 images, a 0 photo as a foundation to capture the most necessary things in the rooms, one -2 image and +2 image to include the shadows and highlights for the final images.

The Flash Shot

With flash shots, it is easier for us to recover the natural color of the walls and objects in the room as it brightens the interior areas, especially when the flash is bounced off a white object in the room like the ceiling.

To get the best flash shot, it is ideal to hold it within 19 inches to 2 feet below the nice white ceiling that points straight up into the ceiling. At the same time, leave the flash close enough to the ceiling can create shadows from objects in the rooms.

A secret is to point in the ceiling or use an umbrella and adjust the power until the whole area is perfect to balance.

The Window Shot

If a property has a nice window view that you want to show out, you should take an inclusive shot for the windows. The flash that directly points at the window frames will make the blending process much more effective and easier. Normally, the -2 EV exposure is enough to capture the right view of the windows.

One thing to consider is that it is better to set aside several seconds before moving the focus box of your camera to the windows so that you will have a perfect shot of the view.

Why Shoot Flambient

The main purpose of real estate photography is to get the images that look natural as the way the human eye sees in person. In other words, final pictures have to are bright, vibrant with the natural colors of the room.

However, if you apply just the ambient method, the problem might be that the wall tends to get shifted. Also, the colors are lost, and shadow areas are sometimes too dark. At the same time, the only flash shot can look fake. It is not a good one with shadows pointing towards the windows. And hot spots in areas are closer to the flash and dark spots in areas.

Flambient photography appears to balance the strength and limitations of all-flash and all-ambient shots, combining them to create the best results.

• –   Get the correct colors of the rooms on the natural lighting.
• –   Reduce the reflections of the shiny surface.
• –   Have better window pulls as the windows are clear as if you’re really in the home without using a pen tool or lasso tool. Then, the windows will not look fake and this reduces the processing time as well.

In short, the flambient technique helps to save you time on editing but still creates higher quality photos.

Shooting Flambient Photos

For the ambient, you apply the HDR photography technique to get enough details both insides and outdoors, and natural lighting.

The equipment setting that you should follow:

• –   You need a good professional or prosumer camera body that allows you to shoot in full-frame with a sensor. Then, you can adapt to low-light situations, so it should be 24 megapixels or more. The good examples are Nikon’s D810 or Canon’s 5Div.
• –   Angle lens – a professional will know that the smaller angle lenses are, the larger space it can take in a frame. Normally, it should be 15 or 16 mm.
• –   For the flash shot, you need to make sure your camera can talk to each unit applying radio poppers or packet wizards or the slave mode of your camera.
• –   A tripod is necessary to help you avoid a very narrow aperture and very slow shutter speed; having crisp and sharp images.

Process the Flambient Shots

To blend ambient and flash shot for flambient one, you can use Photoshop or Lightroom. Some editors choose to use HDR software to blend all the ambient exposure first. After that, merge with the flash shot later to get the right correct, reduce contrast.

This process can be hard for some of you. Then, having a professional editor who can help you with this work is the choice of a lot of photographers.