The formula: For neighbourhood tours, I like overcast. If it's sunny you have trouble with shadows hiding detail and backlit houses. For convenience, I use the cloudy white balance and shoot jpegs. Cloudy makes brick look too orange but most people seem to find the colour pleasing enough. This makes the photos look uniform, like a set, which I want. I look for good angles and shoot the houses as wide as possible then crop them tight, this helps minimize perspective distortion. I also use lens correction to fix the barrel distortion from lens and sometimes further perspective correction and straightening. Sometimes I used stitched images as well, in urban settings it can be difficult to get entire buildings in the frame. My equipment is the Nikon D50 with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens. The lens isn't great, but does the trick for now. Processing is done with GIMP (some individually, some in batch mode) and photo stiching with Hugin.