Why You Can't Shoot Vacation Rentals with a Camera

By William May
Published: 01/15/09 Topics: Comments: 0

Well of course you can.

Today everyone has a camera or two or three. They've moved up from the decades old "Brownies" to Polaroids to click and shoot and now into the world of digital and now to sophisticated digital cameras with large formats (pixels) and self correcting shooting.

So how come when you look at vacation rental photos they are still kind of lousy. Yes they have gotten better over the years due to technology. Some rental managers and even real estate agents have even taken a class or two. Some actually have some talent but still the photos are over exposed, under exposed, out of focus, have washed out colors or are just plain boring.

The reason is no camera can shoot what you eye can behold.

The human eye is a miraculous device. Made up to three layers of issue its complexity is almost too much to understand. The tough Sclerotic coat creates the "white" of the eye except in the front where it forms the transparent cornea. The Choroid middle layer is deeply pigmented with melanin reducing reflection of stray light. It reduces the amount of light and improves its image forming ability. The retina is the inner layer and contains light receptors, the rods and cones that process the signals before passing them back to the brain.

And it does all of this in low light, bright light and everything in between. It thinks and changes and adapts. Something no camera can do. OH sure scientists can cause the image to appear on a medium such as film or transistors (hence digital cameras) which can then be transferred and printed onto another medium (some kind of paper). But that is all it can do.

No camera can interpret what it gets to determine if the color is correct, if all areas are in focus and if the camera is level to the ground (as an example).So giving a novice a camera and expecting them to make art will not produce another Mona Lisa.

Instead, when it comes to our little area of the world - vacation rental and lodging photos - an additional machine must be added before great photography can be created. And that machine is the human brain.

Surely that is required to locate, light and photograph architectural type photos. But then the same machine needs to use other tools to review, edit and fix photos. The goal is to produce vacation rental photos that reveal nothing more and nothing less than what your eye can see in a split second.

Ancil Adams was famous for shooting nature photos especially mountains and forests. But did you know that he spent far more hours in the dark room than in the field?

Shoot vacation rentals is the same. Using tripods, lighting, Photoshop, macros and rigid shooting rules today's top photographers spend more time correcting photos than they do shooting. That is especially true when completing photos for commercial purposes.

In future blogs we'll reveal why photos by the Signatours Image Team far surpass what you find in the usual travel, lodging, website and real estate web pages. You can get a preview at (signatours.com)signatours.com/. Or look at the photos of fantastic vacation homes on our sister company’s website (sunspotresorts.com)sunspotresorts.com/. Tune in next time for the secrets of great photography.

Author: William May, MayPartners Advertising
Blog #: 0097 – 01/15/09