BLOG

“How do I shoot real estate photos?”

If only it was that simple. You could search “how to take real estate photos” on google and come up with 100 different ways to do it. The truth is, you can take pictures of houses with your cellphone and call it a day. (And no, your cellphone is not just as good as a high end camera when it comes to real estate photography). You can also spend hours on an exterior of a million dollar home at twilight alongside a beach just trying to get the right composition and lighting for ONE PICTURE. The point is, there’s an extreme range of expertise and professionalism in the field of real estate photography. The deciding factor is who is buying it. Perhaps the most important thing to consider when taking real estate photos is who is going to see it. Remember, we are selling to potential home buyers, architects, home owners, realtors, interior designers, and so on. All of these different people are going to be looking for specific details within your photos. What do you want to showcase to your client?

Now, after you’ve determined your audience, there are a couple of things you have to keep in mind before you begin shooting photos. Editing software will be your best friend. Without any editing, pictures of real estate just look like crap. This is where hiring a professional photographer comes in, and separates the crap from the amazing, because not only is there a lot involved in actually photographing the house, but sometimes even more work is involved in the editing process! Also, time of day is important! Choose a time where the sun isn’t going to compete with the pictures you are trying to take. The primary source of light for your exterior photos is going to be the sun!

Step 1: Straight Lines

Now on to the fun part. First thing’s first, your lines MUST be straight. In any good picture of a house, interior and exterior, the lines are always straight up and down. These lines are the edges of the house, corners of the room, spaces in between cabinets, dressers, you get the point. The way to ensure you get this right is to use a tripod. Whether it is your cellphone or professional camera, you need a tripod to point your device straight into the room. If the camera is pointed slightly up or down, the lines will not be straight. Most tripods have a bubble level where you can see if the camera is not level. Also, because we are using a wide angle lens, we need to make sure we are not distorting the edges of our photos and getting a “fisheye lens” effect.

Step 2: Compose

Focus on one subject and how the surrounding area compliments it. Don’t just sit in the corner and try to capture everything! Also, use either a one point perspective or two point perspective. The picture above is a one point perspective as the camera is pointed directly into the room at 0 degrees. However, the picture of the living room at the top of the page is a two point perspective, roughly at 45 degrees into the room. Including windows is almost always a plus!

Step 3: Well, it depends..

Following just the first two steps will put you leagues ahead of some of what is out there on Zillow, MLS, and other listing services. The next steps are dependent on the tools you have at your disposal. Are you using lights? Can you change the exposure settings on your camera? Are you going to edit these pictures? All of these questions will determine where you go from here. But now that you have the basics, it now just comes down to how much you are willing to invest in gathering the gear needed to take your pictures to the next level.

Using just a cellphone? Well, step one and two is basically all you’ve got. You could try to experiment using lighting and editing, but at that point you really should invest in a professional camera.

Have a professional camera and tripod and access to editing software? Great! You have what you need to take it up a notch. Using bracketed exposures and blending them together in your editing software is a classic technique in real estate photography called HDR. This is what a TON of real estate photography is nowadays because it is quick, simple, requires zero lighting, and can get you great results. But HDR does not always give you great results, and depending on your editing software, it can actually give you extremely poor results. So what can you do to ensure good results every time? Lighting. Using lighting in real estate photography, unlike using HDR, will give you correct, even colors across your pictures and give you the most control over the way your pictures look. But then the issue is knowing how to use those lights, where to put them, and how much of them to use. But once you get past this point, there’s pretty much no house that you can’t make look good, and you’ll no longer be stuck with feeling confused about how to photograph a house.

And after!

See how much better that looks? We’ve corrected the distortion around the edge of the image, our colors are correct, (we have a white ceiling!) and we can see out the window now. This is the power of Professional Real Estate Photography.. Separating the good from the not so good.