Estate Agent Seeking Digital Camera to Photograph Rooms

An estate agent has contacted me asking if I would recommend a Canon IXUS 950 IS to photograph interiors of houses.

The answer is no. Standard advice for anyone who wishes to take this type of photograph is to select a camera with a wide angle lens. The advantage of a wide angle lens is that you can squeeze greater width into a shot. This means that as well as for photographing property a wide angle lens is useful for taking photos of groups of people and also landscape where you are trying to cram in a wide expanse of scene.

If you look at a specification for a digital camera you may have noticed an item called 35mm equivalent focal length (or something similar). This is the piece of information you use to judge whether or not a camera has a wide angle lens. You will also notice that any lens that can zoom in and out has two figures for the focal length. The first one is the ‘from’ figure and the second is the ‘to’ figure. For example a focal length of a digital camera with a standard 3x zoom lens may be quoted as 35 – 105mm. This means the camera can zoom from a focal length of 35mm to one of 105mm.

A camera lens is considered to be wide angle if the focal length starts from 35mm or less. In my opinion extra width than this really helps therefore for any genuine wide angle photography such as in this case I would suggest looking for cameras with a from or minimum focal length of 28mm. This counts out the Canon IXUS 950 IS. Within this range of cameras the Canon IXUS 850 IS would be the one to go for. It has a similar specification, but also offers a wide angle lens with a minimum focal length of 28mm.

One other point worth raising is that for the best quality shots I would always suggest a digital SLR with a decent wide angle lens. This is the ideal solution, but is a lot more expensive and is therefore out of the price range for a lot of people.