How to Photograph Bedrooms to Enhance Their Appeal
- Composition Tips for Photographing Real Estate Photography Interiors
- Best Lenses for Real Estate Photography
- What You Need to do Before Taking a Single Real Estate Photo
- Best Camera Settings for Real Estate Photography Interiors
photo by asbe via iStock
While kitchens and bathrooms are what most people are drawn to when they’re looking for a new home, you can’t discount the importance of appealing bedroom spaces.
Whether it’s the master retreat where parents can get away from the hubbub of their kids, a mother-in-law suite that aging grandparents can call home, or the kids’ rooms where little ones can play and rest, home buyers want clean, bright, spacious bedrooms.
As a Realtor or a real estate photographer, it’s your job to highlight the positives in bedrooms and make them look warm, inviting, and relaxing. Use the following bedroom photography tips to do just that.
How to Photograph Bedrooms: Introduce the Space With a Wide Shot
photo by bulgac via iStock
One of the simplest tricks you can use to give the impression of space in a bedroom is to position your camera and tripod in the doorway for a wide-angle shot of the room. Doing so gives you a couple of extra feet of space to maneuver so you can capture more details in the shot.
If possible, try to capture a photo that shows three walls, as shown above. This will make the room looks more spacious than it actually is. What’s more, this will provide potential buyers with a view of as much of the room as possible.
A wide-angle lens will distort straight lines, so ceilings and walls may appear to be bowed. You can easily fix this in post-processing, though, with programs like Lightroom or Photomatix Pro.
Notice how in the photo above all the lines are perfectly straight - this is exactly what you want!
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Bedroom Photography Tip: Make the Bed the Focal Point
photo by alabn via iStock
Though not every bedroom you photograph will be staged with furniture, if the room is decorated, the bed should be the focal point of the shot. It’s a bedroom after all!
The bed absolutely should be made, and made well. Hospital corners will keep sheets and other bedding beautifully tight and will give the look of a luxury hotel.
If possible, ask the homeowner to stage the bed with a neutral bed cover and accent with small, yet bold pops of color to make the bed look that much more inviting, as was done above.
photo by bulgac via iStock
What you certainly want to avoid is a bedroom that has been over-staged. The goal here is to make the room look inviting - not chaotic with competing colors and patterns everywhere.
For example, the photo above has way too much going on between the bright colors, the patterned rug, the multi-colored globes hanging from the ceiling, and so forth.
Though the room look well put together, with this type of staging, it might be difficult for potential buyers to envision how they would like this room put together.
How to Make Bedrooms Look Their Best: Let the Natural Light Shine In
photo by KatarzynaBialasiewicz via iStock
Nothing makes a bedroom look less inviting than a dark photo. Likewise, if there’s not enough lighting in the shot, the bedroom will look smaller than it actually is.
In addition to turning on the lights in the room, open the blinds or curtains to allow natural light to fill the space.
This will highlight the size of the room and offer a glimpse of what the view is like outside the windows.
photo by bulgac via iStock
Of course, the challenge with photographing any room with a window - particularly smaller windows that are common in some bedrooms - is the room being darker than the window.
Bracketing exposures helps get around this problem, and merging those exposures together in post-processing results in a beautifully exposed image with highlights and shadows that have kept all their detail.
If the property you’re photographing has non-conforming bedrooms without any windows or if the view out the window isn’t exactly something you want to highlight, turn on all the lights in the room to give it adequate illumination.
The bracket-and-merge technique mentioned above is still in play for these types of bedrooms as well. See how this technique works in the video above.
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Photographing Bedrooms: Decluttering is a Must
photo by phototropic via iStock
If there’s a room in a house that’s got a lot of clutter, it will likely be kids’ rooms and bedroom closets.
As noted earlier, it’s imperative that if there’s furniture in the bedroom that the bed is perfectly made. Likewise, the entire room needs to be clean and free of clutter.
Kids rooms should look like the one above - neat, tidy, and without toys all over the place. Notice how spacious the room looks, even with a large bunk bed occupying much of the frame.
With toys out of sight and a lot of floor space showing, this photo gives the impression that the room is more than adequately sized to accommodate a child and their toys and other belongings.
photo by pisittar via iStock
Bedroom closets can be a challenge to declutter, but at the very least, items in the closet should be as organized as possible.
This isn’t as big of an issue for regular-sized closets as you likely won’t photograph them. But potential buyers will surely open closet doors to see how big they are, so homeowners should be sure their closets are all tidy nonetheless.
photo by JodiJacobson via iStock
Walk-in closets are a feature that many buyers want, so you should strive to photograph any such closets in the home.
As suggested earlier, set up your camera and tripod in the doorway of the closet and use a wide-angle lens to capture as much of the closet as you can.
Since most homes have pretty standard closets, the goal here is to simply show the space and the storage options, as was done in the image above.
The Details Matter in Bedroom Photography
photo by imaginima via iStock
Like with any other space in a home, the details matter when photographing a bedroom.
While wide shots and having the bed as the focal point are important, so too is highlighting any details that make the bedroom a unique space.
The angled ceilings and beams in the photo above, for example, are a wonderful subject to highlight. Fireplaces, balconies, large windows, and the view out the windows are suggested subjects as well.
Remember - the goal with your photos is to help potential buyers envision themselves living in the home. With the tips I’ve outlined above, you will be able to do just that!
