How to Take Real Estate Photos That Make Your Home Stand Out
- Mount camera on a tripod.
- Take multiple exposures, bracketing between each image capture.
- Develop with a bracket and merge program to blend the exposures.
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As a homeowner or a real estate agent, you can take the pictures for your listing yourself if you’re a competent photographer. All it takes is time and a little effort to educate yourself on how to take the most compelling real estate photos.
Here are a few important real estate photography tips for how to take real estate photos that will help your house sell.
Real Estate Photography Tips for Homeowners
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One of the more important real estate photography tips for homeowners is to depersonalize the house if at all possible. For an unfurnished home, this is easy. It’s when you’re taking pictures for listing your home and you’re still living there that this tip comes to the fore of how to take real estate photos.
Depersonalizing means that all of those knick-knacks that say so much about you and your family may say so much that people viewing the listing may not be able to imagine themselves there. It’s a good idea to follow these real estate photography tips for sellers to have a wide appeal.
You’re probably already making some changes in order to make your home more appealing to a large number of people, such as clearing out overgrown bushes or repainting some rooms to neutral colors, so just take it all a couple of steps further and show off your house to prospective buyers.
Real Estate Photography Tips for Realtors
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Real estate photography tips for realtors include becoming familiar with the tools and techniques that real estate photographers use to maximize the viewership and appeal of homes being listed.
Such as leveling out the camera when using wide-angle lenses, bracket and merge HDR for showing the details of the home, and composition tips such as showing 3 walls. These listing photo tips are what the photographers for other homes are doing, so use them yourself for showcasing your listings.
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Level the Camera
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Wide-angle lenses are a real estate photographer’s friend. Ultra-wide-angle lenses allow us to capture a great view of the interior spaces we are showcasing. However, there is a major concern to be aware of when using ultra-wide-angle lenses.
The concern is to watch for the wide lenses introducing distortion into our images. Modern lenses are fantastically corrected for this, but straight lines, especially near the edges of the image, can still look distorted by our wide lenses when the camera is not leveled out properly.
The technique to fix this is a basic rule of thumb for how to take real estate photos, namely, use a tripod and a spirit level. The level can fit in the camera hot shoe and barely costs anything, the price of a fast-food lunch.
Tripods also let us take advantage of the next tip for how to take real estate photos.
Bracket and Merge HDR
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Bracket and merge HDR photography is a marvelous method for capturing incredible detail inside and outside the home in both shadowy areas and bright highlights.
Here’s how to take real estate photos with bracket and merge HDR in 3 easy steps:
It’s really not that much to actually do in real life. Here is a YouTube video that describes this method of how to take real estate photos.
Show 3 Walls
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As a real estate photographer, our main goal is to show prospective buyers an accurate view of the property as opposed to creating art. It’s still art, but art with a very specific purpose.
Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines, S Curves, are all great composition tools, but the one composition idea used for real estate photography that makes the most difference is the 3 Wall composition tip.
Simply put, for interior room views, try to capture parts of 3 walls. There are a lot of ways to make this happen, but using our first tip for keeping straight lines straight by leveling the camera is very important to have technique work out properly.
Using these listing photo tips for how to take real estate photos will work whether you are a real estate agent, the homeowner, or a photographer starting out in this excellent genre of professional photography.