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High-quality real estate photography is a key to quickly selling a house. Your target audience of eager home buyers will be easy to reel in if you have the most dynamic, beautiful exterior and interior photos on your listing.
This is part two of a two-part blog series about common mistakes in real estate photography. Check out our previous post for more things to avoid if you want to deliver high-quality photos for your clients!
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to walk into a real estate photography session without a prepared shot list. It’s easy to assume that every home listing just contains standard shots of every room, the front yard, and the backyard. While those are the most important photos that potential homebuyers will look for, that doesn’t mean those are the only ones you should take.
Consider your home’s unique features and furnishings. You could highlight a bedroom that’s more intricately designed than others or a kitchen with hidden nooks and drawers that a home cook will love. To highlight these one-of-a-kind spaces, you may need specific lights or lenses. It’s important to be as prepared as possible.
If you’re photographing a relatively darker space, flash is a great way to bring in some more light. However, flash should be used in moderation, much like you want to avoid red-eye in portraits. Pointing it directly into a dark room will not create an attractive photo.
Bouncing your flash off a blank wall or part of the ceiling can help create a softer look. Adjust your light settings while on-site, so you won’t have to spend so much time in post-production.
In real estate photography, what you see is what you get. As discussed in the previous blog post, this is not the niche for creative angles or distorted photos. Your lines should be as straight and realistic as possible—horizontals should be horizontal, and verticals should be vertical.
Again, you can save yourself in editing by making sure your camera is perfectly level while you’re shooting on-site. Your tripod should be your right-hand man to ensure all your lines are squared off.
As a professional, it’s in your best interest to streamline your workflow as much as you can. While every client deserves your utmost attention and effort, you need to be efficient, too. You shouldn’t have to linger for hours on editing real estate photos. Your client just wants you to deliver high-quality, clean, accurate images of their home that will attract many potential buyers.
When you’re photographing the property on-site, don’t work with the mindset that you can fix everything in post-production. Instead, you should focus on getting the best possible shot in the best possible light so you won’t have to do too much fiddling to make it beautiful. And when you sit down to edit on your computer, presets and batch editing will save a lot of time and effort.
Real estate photography is an incredibly important and dynamic niche that can make the home selling process go by much more smoothly. Avoiding these mistakes, along with the others listed in part one, will ensure a real estate listing that home buyers will clamor to offer for.
If you don’t think you have the skill set to handle real estate photography yourself, you can ask professionals to help. Bear Kerry Productions is an award-winning luxury real estate photography company servicing St. Petersburg, FL, and nearby areas. Contact us for your photography needs today!