Camera Ready San Francisco Bay Area photographer Ken VanBree does a lot of work for contractors and remodelers. He recognizes that many remodelers don’t use a professional photographer, in particular for before- and during-construction photos.
People buy based on pixels, but pixels aren’t the answer. The issue isn’t how many pixels are on the camera but how many are on the subject of interest. “You can get excellent pictures with 3 megapixels, but you have to be careful how far away you are when you take the pictures,” VanBree says.
And he advises against interchangeable lenses: “The building environment is dusty and dirty. Change a lens in a building where they’re doing drywall and you’ll get dust on your sensors and will have to clean them. Small point-and-shoot cameras with a zoom lens are great,” he says.
The camera VanBree recommends for remodelers is the Nikon CoolPix S7c. It’s small and has about 20 seconds of sound per picture. You can narrate on the spot or at a later time. Other cameras have this capability, too, but the Nikon, VanBree says, “has an easy user interface for adding voice notes to pictures.”
The camera’s sound files are separate .wav files and play in any media player. Nikon provides a small interface, similar to iPhoto on a Mac. “When you run a slide show of pictures, if there’s a sound file attached, it plays.” The camera comes with a dock that you can set up to automatically download when you set the camera in it.
Of course, unless you have a camera with you, you won’t take pictures. Any camera you use must be small, easy to use, and fairly rugged. Despite all his fancy professional models, VanBree recently documented his family vacation using a CoolPix he carried either in his pocket or in a small cell phone case clipped to his belt.
Moving Testimony Jeff King, owner of Jeff King & Co. in San Francisco uses digital images before, during, and after a project, but what he finds even more helpful is video. He videotapes all the structural connections from a liability standpoint. For a whole-house remodel, especially, it comes in handy. King turns the camera over to the electrician, the plumber, or even the radiant heat contractor to walk through and narrate their work. “It’s been so helpful, and inevitably we have to go back and look at these tapes,” King says.
For any remodel more extensive than just one room, Leif Jackson, owner of Jackson Remodeling in Seattle, uses video and narrates what he thinks is important: “Things like, ‘There’s a switch, standard height, mounted on a triple stud to the left of the bathroom doorway; the ceiling light is centered, and there’s a box for a smoke detector just inside the door.’” He says using video has saved him enough times that he’s made it a standard practice to take the time to record. “We pan around a room and capture every inch of every wall, floor, and ceiling.”
He recently used three videotapes to document a house. “That would be hundreds of digital photos,” he says. “Unless you take time to label every photo, [you won’t know what you’re looking at].” Jackson starts at the door of every room and goes around clockwise because he says he “needs a system that makes it easy to find what I’m looking for.” Though Jackson still uses videotape and must label everything and store it in his office, his goal is to move to digital recordings.