a lot of going back and forth in my first threads, im just finding my direction so please be patient with me,

In real estate (or whatever you Yanks call it) what makes a photo stand out from the competition on internal shots is the bright external sunlight to be well balanced with the light within the room,

HDR is the answer to all our prayers, or is it? 

I am finding out from my limited experience that in very high contrast situations HDR is to problematic, with bleed artifacts,halos etc, and requiring a lot of post processing,

Being based in Spain high contrast is something i have to endure 10 months of the year :-)

i have tried a very high contras window shot with many combinations of exposures, and on a few different hdr software packages, all of the results have been poor if i go for good outside quality,  and just reasonable if i go for average exposure (in /out)

So back to photography 1on1, you would increase the internal ambient light to match the external ambient light by introducing artificial light, (not rocket science)so i go to my photography draw and pull out 4 speedlights 2 light stands and 4 shoot through umbrellas,(its a big draw) set up and take a pic (maybe 50) of my high contrast window, hey presto a perfectly balanced shot

so if this is all wrapped up why am i posting?

Introducing so much artificial light will introduce many problems of its own, practibility, portability, time, color temp, shadows and possibly flattening the image,

My inexperienced thoughts are to introduce less artificial light and still do bracketed hdr shots, trying  to get the best of both worlds and cut down on post processing,

I have ruled out any form of constant light or studio strobe system because of the practicability of wires or large battery packs being carried around

onto speedlights, the 8mm on a crop or 10mm on your ff is too wide for a speed light to cover, so a shoot through umbrella and the bounced back light will cover adequately, but at possibly 2/4 stops difference adding this light will cause shadows, adding 2 light stands at 45o will minimise shadows, on a single shot this would be fine, but in producing a tour you will have changing shadow areas, can the stitching software cope with this?

obviously the quality of the tour will be determined by the intended market, but i feel you have to be 100% sure in your abilities before you approach the market,

what are your thoughts on HDR? and do you think my comments are crap? would you pay me to take your pictures?(metaphorically speaking)

Steve

Hi Chip, I use the bracket method in everything I shoot, VT's or stills. I find the brightest spot in the room, usually a window and drop 1 setting from what the camera says is normal. That is now my starting point then I take the 5 brackets. I end up with -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 EV. This will normally take care of the blown out windows. In photomatix you can tone it down some to look like a normal shot without the HDR effect.
I stitch my scenes before I take them into Photomatix and then finish in Photoshop.