Every few weeks someone asks what's in my bag, usually hoping the answer is a secret piece of gear that will make their photos look like mine. It never is. The truth is that my luxury real estate kit has gotten smaller over the years, not bigger. Knowing what to leave in the car is its own skill.
The camera matters least
I shoot a full-frame mirrorless body, and honestly almost any modern one would do. Dynamic range is the spec I actually care about — the ability to hold detail in a bright window and a shadowed corner in the same frame is what separates a professional interior from a snapshot. Megapixels are a distant second. Nobody has ever rejected a listing because it was only twenty-four megapixels.
What lives on the front of that body matters far more. Ninety percent of my interiors are shot on a tilt-shift lens or a sharp wide-angle in the 16–24mm range. The tilt-shift is the quiet hero: it keeps vertical lines perfectly straight, so walls don't lean and doorways don't keystone. That single correction is the difference between a room that feels calm and one that feels subtly off in a way most buyers can't name.
Light I bring, light I find
For stills, I lean on natural light and bracket aggressively — three to seven exposures blended by hand so the windows keep their view and the interior stays true. I avoid the over-flashed, HDR-cartoon look that plagues so much real estate work. The goal is a room that looks like the best version of itself on a beautiful afternoon, not a video game.
When I do add light, it's subtle: a single flash bounced off a ceiling to lift a dim hallway, or a small LED panel to put a catchlight in a dark corner. I'd rather under-light and let a space feel honest than blast it flat.
The cinematic layer
Luxury listings increasingly live or die on video, so the kit grows for those. A gimbal for smooth walking shots, a drone for the establishing exterior and to show the lot and the neighborhood, and a slider for the slow, deliberate reveals that make a home feel expensive. I shoot video in a flat color profile and grade it later to match the FRME look — warm, filmic, restrained.
The unglamorous essentials
The gear nobody posts about is the gear that saves shoots. A sturdy tripod with a geared head for precise framing. A laptop on site to confirm exposures before I leave. Microfiber cloths, because a smudge on a mirror is invisible until it's a thousand pixels wide. And spare batteries — more than I think I'll need, every single time.
If there's a lesson in all of it, it's this: clients aren't paying for the kit. They're paying for the judgment behind it. The gear just has to disappear so the home can be the only thing in the frame.