Patrick Bertolino’s road to the top of the Houston, Texas, real estate photography scene started in a one-hour photo lab.
“I’m a master photographer at PPA,” Bertolino, M.Photog., CPP, says, “but I’m a blue-collar photographer man.” Instead of a college photography degree, Bertolino had a job at an Eckerd Express Photo lab. From there, he moved to a custom lab that serviced one of Houston’s top portrait photographers, Evin Thayer, “a local legend,” he says. Eventually, Bertolino began working for Thayer, assisting him for eight years, and moved on to the digital darkroom at Giddings, one of the oldest photography studios in Texas.
“So, I got a master’s degree worth of real-life experience,” says Bertolino. “When I went out on my own in 2005, I started with what I knew, portraiture and weddings.” He was successful but didn’t love the niche. “But I loved the photo industry,” he says. “I always tell people, stay in the industry if you can; sometimes you just have to pivot.”
A NEW PATH
A fortuitous phone call corrected Bertolino’s career course. “One day, I got a call from a broker here in Houston that wanted their realtors to use a professional photographer,” he explains. “I did a couple of shoots for them and the next thing I knew, I had 70 clients that, back then, were paying 75 bucks a house. I was fine with that, but I didn’t think it was going to be a career stepping-stone.” Over time, however, Bertolino came to appreciate the architecture of the homes he photographed and began branching out to photograph industrial sites and commercial properties. “Right now, I’m about 50% residential real estate and 50% everything else,” he says. “And when I say everything else, that ranges from a funeral home and an airplane to an elementary school and a barbershop.”
Bertolino believes that photographers should be competent in a few areas of photography but should select a focus. “If you aren’t [specializing], where do you market? What’s your pathway to a clientele?” he asks. For example, he understands what makes a successful real estate photo. Surprisingly, he explains, it’s not necessarily to sell the specific property. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “When you’re selling a million-dollar home, the pictures need to look great to showcase it.” But the goal with the photographs is to attract more clientele to the agent. “When people say, ‘Oh, let’s sell our home. Look at that realtor’s photos. Let’s get her,’” Bertolino says, he calls his work successful.
TECHNICAL MASTER
Bertolino has a clear vision of how to get the most out of a given property both technically and aesthetically. “I have what I call my safe zone for [photographing] interiors, which is between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.,” he explains. “I like my light overhead for interiors unless the client wants something specific, like shots at sunset. I’m not trying to go super dramatic with lighting all the time. Sometimes I’ll shoot the exteriors at twilight so that we can get the glow from the inside and get the skies to look pretty. These days, that can be faked, but it’s always better to compose in the camera.”
While some properties are camera-ready, most need Bertolino’s lighting, which he refers to as “Thor’s hammer.” “I use a Godox AD200,” he explains. “I do compositing, so I don’t need to set up six lights on stands. I take a shot of the room, then illuminate different pieces of furniture and different parts of the room, then put them all together in post. It has to be flawless. I want the results to look natural.”
Bertolino takes advantage of post-production to enhance the scenes, “just as long as it is genuine to the subject,” he explains. For editing, he uses Adobe Lightroom with a plugin called Enfuse to blend images, Photomatix HDR program for exteriors, and Photoshop. Real estate agents and homeowners still stage rooms, but these days, technology exists to virtually add furniture to an empty room or parts of it. Bertolino often outsources that part of post-production. He usually composites numerous images to create a final work.
“If I opened every one of those images in Photoshop layers, it would take me an hour per image, and I deliver sometimes 50 finished images to a client,” he explains. “But I have people [I work with] in Vietnam who are just starting [their] workday when I’m going to bed. They can spend eight hours hand-blending these images. They can also drop in furniture if I want it. They can do a sky replacement. But whatever they do, it’s all got to work together. I have people I work with regularly, so they know my style and I’ll also give them specific notes. In the morning, I wake up and [the photos are] in my Dropbox.”
ICONIC DESIGNS
Some of Bertolino’s photographs of unusual buildings have become historical documents reminiscent of the work of the legendary architectural photographer Julius Schulman, who recorded the work of some of the mid-20th century’s greatest architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Raphael Soriano, Pierre Koenig, and Oscar Niemeyer. Some of the structures Schulman captured now only exist in those images.
For example, Bertolino recalls his image of a mid-century modern former car dealership. “I grew up seeing that building” he says of the dealership, which belonged to the owner of the Houston Oilers at the time. “Someone else bought it and put these classic cars in the front for display, including Steve McQueen’s Jaguar. I always said, ‘I want to [photograph] that one day,’ and the universe heard me.” He named the image (below) “The Jewel Box,” and calls the experience a gift. “There were warehouses behind this showroom area that were full of luxury cars that you could rent,” Bertolino says.
ALL YELLOW
Bertolino’s signature camera these days is a yellow Nikon Z 6II. “Yellow is my trademark; it’s my branding,” he explains. “I love consistency. When I show up at a shoot, I look pretty much the same every time. I’m the guy with the yellow camera, black polo shirt, gray jeans, and Merrell’s with yellow shoelaces and a yellow accented Pelican case.” He likes the Merrell’s because they don’t track mud into houses, though he also often wears booties to cover his shoes. “Real estate photographers always have clean shoes,” he says.
When it comes to lenses, his workhorse is the Nikkor Z 14-30mm f/4 S lens with a polarizing filter. But other lenses are always on standby. “If I’m shooting a tall entryway or a spiral staircase, sometimes I’ll put on a PC (perspective control) lens and shoot it in thirds,” he explains. “I’ll shoot the bottom third, the middle third, and the top third horizontally, by shifting up, and then I photo merge those and get a single high-definition image rather than just going vertical.”
Patrick Bertolino
Bertolino is drone certified, so a DJI Air 3 drone is also always part of his gear. “The drone is just a tool on my belt,” he says. “It’s like a hammer. There are drone operators out there, and then there are photographers with drones, and I put myself in that second category. Once you learn the basics, operating a drone is not that hard. But composing and creating imagery that is appealing, and works for your clientele, is the photographer part of it.”
Bertolino believes in giving back to his industry. “I always love talking with other photographers,” he says. “I had lunch with a really good photographer friend of mine the other day and we were exchanging ideas and discussing techniques. That’s often more informative than some of the classes you can take. When I was trying to get into photography, I couldn’t find any help. There was a lot of gatekeeping, and so I’ve always told anybody that’s come to me with a genuine interest, ‘I’d be more than happy to answer any question.’ My mantra and my usual advice [is], ‘Keep shooting. Your business or your life may be falling apart, but by God, get that camera in your hand and create something.’”
Mark Edward Harris is an award-winning photographer and writer based in Los Angeles.
