Prince George Real Estate

This post offers up a bit of a technical explanation of why a common cellphone will not work as well as a digital SLR camera when photographing homes for sale.  For the most part it comes down to the sensor possessed by the camera.  For a cellphone to fit inside the palm of your hand, everything inside of it needs to be very small, including the camera and sensor.  This means that the 5 megapixel sensor inside of your cellphone is miniscule, with a huge amount of pixels jammed into it. The modern full frame SLR has a very large sensor, and although it often has much more megapixels to fit into it (12-30) the increased size of the sensor still leaves more than enough room for the additional pixel count.  Here is a nice diagram illustrating various sensor sizes:

The very common Apple Iphone has a sensor that is 1/3″, represented here by the yellow box.  As you can see, the full frame rectangle is about 40 times bigger than the tiny cell phone sensor, and yet there are only 3-5 times the amount of pixels in that space.  This means that the pixels inside of the larger sensor are actually bigger, which is a good thing.  I know you may be surprised, as in the case of televisions and smart phones and tablets, more pixels in a smaller space is better – but this is not so for cameras.

It helps to look at pixels as individual buckets.  Light comes into the camera and the photons pour into all of the little buckets that make up the sensor.  When the shutter closes and the picture is done, some of the buckets will have very few photons, and some will have many.  Those with very few make up the darkest (shadows) parts of the image while the very full buckets will be the bright parts (white clouds etc).  Since the buckets on a large sensor are physically able to hold a wider range of photons, say 1-10 000 000, they have  much greater ability to represent darks and lights.  The small sensor with it’s little tiny buckets might only be able to hold 1-10 000 photons and therefore the range between very dark and very light has far fewer steps. 

This capacity is referred to as the ‘dynamic range’ of a camera, or the total range of tones a sensor can detect before reaching absolute black and absolute white.  You may notice that pictures taken with a cell phone have a classic look: bright in the window and very dark in the rest of the frame.  To illustrate this point I used my own 3.2 megapixel camera on my HTC Touch Pro to snap a couple shots off while at a shoot.  Here is a comparison of a shot taken right out of the camera with my cell phone:

Cell phone picture - yikes!

So as I have mentioned in previous posts, the dark interior and bright window are symptomatic of a picture taken with a small sensor camera. The image taken with an SLR looks much better, and is able to pick up a wider range of tones throughout the image.  Of course there are other factors in play here such as post processing, the use of a wide angle lens, and the use of lighting equipment, so this example is here simply to illustrate the point that small sensors have less dynamic range. Feel free to click on the images for a larger view.

Much more pleasant!

The other big bonus of using an SLR is the advantage of an interchangeable lens system.  My cell phone forced me to step nearly outside of the bedroom to get a decent shot, and yet even then the picture is dominated by the bed. An SLR and wide angle lens are a must when taking interior photographs.  A great wide angle lens is the Nikon 12-24 mm lens, allowing the shooter to capture a vast amount of interior space:

Nikon 12-24 mm lens

There are other issues with cellphones as well, such as the image noise (that grainy look) produced by those little wee sensors, which is also the result of having all of those pixels jammed into a small space.  Also, there are usually unpleasant color casts, and often severe blurring, because let’s face it, most of us don’t remember to give the lens a good cleaning before we start snapping photos with our cell phones.

This is not to say that SLR systems are perfect (They are very $$), but there is simply no comparison. So when you are planning on marketing a home for sale, hire someone who has the kind of equipment and expertise to do the job right, or invest in the equipment yourself and take the necessary amount of time to make that home stand out from all of the cell phone pictures floating about on MLS.

Thanks a lot,

Dan