With ever-increasing competition in the real estate sector, houses go on and off the market daily. Due to this escalating competition, every agent is battling to grab the attention of homebuyers. As such, photography has become a vital part of attracting customers in the real estate industry.
In this day and age, a listing with pictures catches more attention than one without it. Real estate photography gives your potential buyers a reason to fall in love with the home. Whether you’re an agent or a person trying to sell his own home, it is almost impossible to ignore the importance of photography. While searching for a home online, homebuyers make the first impression based on the pictures. In fact, people don’t even click on a listing with no pictures.
With the increasing demand for real estate photography, numerous individuals have entered this business. However, not every photographer is skilled in clicking great real estate and architecture photographs. Unlike wedding or wildlife photography, doing photography for real estate is somewhat tricky. Real estate photography is always in demand, but not everyone knows how to take proper pictures of a home. This article lists the top 3 pro real estate photography tips to click beautiful, consistent photos of your property.
1. Use of right Equipment
Clicking great pictures starts with the right equipment. Since you need to take clear and bright pictures, make sure you have a high-quality camera, lens, and tripod to get started. In addition to this, professionals also make judicious use of supplemental lighting and Photoshop techniques. Use wide-angle lenses, and the camera should allow you to add a cable release, a flash, different lenses, and wireless triggers. To avoid converging vertical lines, you can use tilt-shift lenses. It is recommended to use a tripod to avoid taking blurry pictures due to a shaky hand, but it’s not an absolute necessity. As far as shooting techniques are concerned, it depends on shooting conditions where you will need to use exposure blending, HDR, wireless flash, and light painting with multiple exposures.
2. Interior Photography
Real estate photography requires highlighting the important features of the property. The photographs include the exterior and interiors of a house, such as a deck or a patio, landscaping, and gardens, pool, the living room, kitchen, dining area, master bedroom, master bath, etc. While shooting interiors, there is a common issue of edges and corners of walls, door frames, and windows with vertical sides, and these edges are not essentially vertical. However, by using a tilt-shift lens, this problem can be solved. Another important consideration is holding the camera at the perfect height. This is debatable because, for some, the ideal height is chest height, while for some, it is the height of the doorknob or even lower. Usually, it is preferred to keep the camera at your chest height and correct vertical lines using methods like a tilt-shift lens or the Lens Correction Tool in Photoshop.
3. Consider Exterior Lighting
The secret of gaining more customers is clicking great real estate photographs of your house by mastering the photography skills, such as right use of angles, perspectives, composition, HDR, supplemental lighting, color matching, and exposure blending.
When shooting outdoors, you need to take care of the early or late daylighting. Taking pictures of the exterior of the house requires selecting the right time of the day. Check if the home faces the sunrise or sunset, or neither. White skies usually reduce the impact of an otherwise great exterior image. Some homeowners want to show their clients the night photographs of the house. In this case, turn on all the lights in a room and shoot at a certain time. It is important here that the lighting in each room is even by adding lights.