WARNING – Adult Material (not for light hearted)

WARNING! This post has some hard core stuff which I will talk about so if you can handle it then keep on reading. But I am about to get a whole lot of people mad at me, yet I am at a point where I just want to say “I don’t care”.

I love photography. I have been doing this for over 10 years now and yes maybe I am not as good as Ansel Adams or like some other big shot but I am getting there. A little bit of background about this post – I have been trying to write it since July this year and at times I would say “whatever” and at other times I would delete everything and re-type it with lots of emotional/frustrating words.

Even though I do have my favorite camera Fuji X-T1 for many reasons (by the way Fuji X-T2 came out and I WANT IT) and you can see some of the reasons HERE from the past blog post. But I try to experiment not only with style of photography but also with equipment. Meaning I do rent out lots of cameras and lenses to tryout, as well as take online classes to see what is trending / how to use photoshop to perfect my skills. YET before I say anything else, take a look at photos below first.

I couldn’t stop myself and when I was photographing this gentleman I knew that this photo would look good B&W. So here it is for the rest of the world to see, since I have not delivered this photo to the client in B&W.

Now that you have seen the photos above here is the camera/lens and the set up which I was photographing with. This is at a minimum effort in photoshop (meaning this is almost raw photos from the camera) and photography because of many reasons I don’t want to get into. Also I want to mention before I get angry comments; it doesn’t matter what job it is I will always deliver to the standards that the client is requesting, now which equipment I use to deliver the photos is up to me. I will never use cheap equipment for any job and that’s why I always try out the equipment before I use it on any job. I have my own standards of what equipment should be and anything below that is cheap.

What do you think, is it the camera that does the work or the photographer? This is an entry level DSLR (low end camera) and a low end lens. There is more to this blog post than what I originally wanted to write about. I will keep some of the things to myself or this would just end up as an angry post and I will need to add angry birds game just for the fun of it to relieve all the emotions =).

Where am I going with this? Originally I didn’t start my portrait photography in Sacramento, it all started long ago in Pennsylvania but all of that is in the past because when I make cold calls in real estate area (yes I actually make cold calls and yes it does work) one of the answers I hear especially from real estate agents is “I bought an expensive camera so I don’t have to pay you to do a job that I can do now”. WELL FINE! DO IT YOURSELF! Yet even if I choose to photograph portraits with low standard camera I can still do a better job than a real estate agent who owns very expensive one. It all comes down to this: you can’t be jack of all trade to be a professional in all areas. I’m very good at photography but if you ask me to do video, well I’m not so good at it. Some might say “it’s just little bit different from photography how hard can it be?” It’s very different from photography and recently I did a little bit of video few weeks ago and don’t want to do it again. By the way if you need really great guy at video contact Denis HERE, he does great job at video.

So real estate agents, I don’t sell homes and I don’t even try to because it’s not what I do, what I do is photography. Yes almost 90% of the time sellers ask me questions about the home and how to sell it while I am photographing their home, what do I say to them? “Talk to your real estate agent, he/she is the one whom you should be asking these questions.” My job is to help the agents to sell the homes, by providing best quality photos and not to be a real estate agent with all the answers of how to sell the home. Yes I still have to think like a real estate agent and figure out what make each home sell, and photograph that. But when a real estate agent tries to do what I do and thinks they are great at photography, I am sorry but just shut up and don’t tell me you know what you are doing. Because the reason why you bought the expensive camera is not to use a professional photographer and skip that step in all the areas(by the way it’s either cheap camera that sales person told you it’s a great camera or it is expensive camera but you are wasting your money because you will never know the camera’s full potential).

Oh some of you real estate agents, you just drive me crazy thinking you can do it all. Yet I think some real estate agents forget that they are in marketing/sales business and more effort you put in representing your product the better sale you will have. But some of you are thinking on the cheap, less effort as possible and the end result is low. Yes I will admit even I can’t make gold out of silver but I will make every home look its best to attract buyers for you (and that also goes for portraits as well).

Here is something interesting: one of the images above was photographed with my Fuji Xt-1 and rest of them with Nikon D3200, can you tell the difference (by the way it’s not the B&W photo)? And that is my point, a professional photographer will be able to take entry level DSLR and still get great photos out it. Yes he can do even better with high-end camera but he will still be good at what he does with low end as well.

This photo was captured with Nikon D7000 on auto settings and with Tamron lens.

And this photos was photographed with same camera yet after everything that I do to make a home look good.

Sacramento Portrait Photography by Shutter Avenue Photography