Choosing a Camera for Interiors

The single biggest issue to consider when choosing a camera for shooting interiors is which one has the widest angle lens possible. This is because you will constantly be faced with the problem of including as much of a room as possible in a shot and the walls keep you from backing up!

Digital cameras make the problem worse than it was with film cameras because the have what is referred to as the "crop factor" or "telephoto effect" caused by the fact that digital image sensors are typically smaller than the size of a 35mm film frame. Another way of saying this is if you have a 24mm lens that you've used for years to take interior photos with your Canon or Nikon film camera and you put that same lens on a new Digital SLR the lens act like a 38 mm lens on the digital camera. This 1.5 or 1.6 focal lenth multiplier effect occurs with all digital digital cameras that don't have digital sensors the size of 35mm film.

The only way to get inexpensive digital cameras that do not have removable lenses to be wide-angle is to use a converter/lens (sometimes they are called lenses and sometimes called converters) that screw on the front of the built-in camera lens. These converters have a foal length multiplier of less than 1. For example if the smallest focal length the cameras built-in lens has is 38mm and the converter has a multiplier of .63 then the effective focal length with the multiplier is 23.94mm.

So before you buy a digital camera to shoot interiors make sure a converter is available for the make and model you are buying.

See my video presentation on the nikonbusiness.com website on using the CoolPix 4300 for Real Estate Photography. Between 1999 and mid-2004 I used CoolPix cameras for doing interior Real Estate photography. Nikon saw the results on our real estate website http://www.levicannon.com/ and used our experience with CoolPix cameras as a case study on their new website launched in the summer of 2004. This video shows an example of using a wide-angle converter.