How-To: Beginner’s Tips for Better Real Estate Photographs

A huge part of any listing presentation is the photograph.  It’s often the first thing the potential buyer notices, especially if you’re featuring your listings via Single Property Sites or any of the big listings databases online.  Improving your property photography can pay huge dividends, and it’s not as difficult as you think.  Here are four ways to make your listing photography stand out from the crowd.

1. Choose the Time of Day Carefully
Agents are busy people, but one of the surest ways to improve your real estate photography is to choose the time of day you shoot your photos carefully.  The middle of the afternoon is the worst time to do it – the sun is bright, producing harsh shadows and washed-out colors.  Professional photographers know this; they put their cameras away in the middle of the day.

The best time to shoot is in a period the photographers call the “Golden Hour.”  This is a period about an hour after sunrise or an hour before sunset.  The quality of light during this time frame produces gorgeous skies, more diffused shadows and all around better pictures.  Getting up early – or staying up late – to take your listings photos will pay off with a more aesthetically pleasing image.

2. Use a Small Aperture
Aperture is a technical photography term referring to the width of the lens opening.  This affects two things – the amount of light that’s let into the camera and the depth of field.  Most modern digital cameras have an option to shoot in a aperture-priority mode, which gives the photographer the ability to select their own aperture.  Typically on your digital camera this is represented by a letter “A” on the dial or an “Av”.

Aperture is measured in f/numbers – the smaller the f/number (f/2.8 and f/4 are common values), the smaller the depth of field.  For real estate photography, you want as wide of a depth of field as possible.  This means using larger f/numbers for a larger depth of field.  If you’re shooting with a reasonable amount of sunlight, try setting your aperture to f/12  or f/16.  This will create a more uniform sharpness across your image, since a larger depth of field means more of the image is in focus.  This is important for sites that let you display huge images of your property (like Single Property Sites) or for reproducing your photo in print advertisements.  It’s a small detail, but one that definitely makes a difference.

3. Change the Angle
Realtors understand the importance of standing out from the crowd, and the principle works the same for photography as well.  A photo that looks different gets noticed.  If you’re taking all your photographs from street level right in front of the house, there’s very little to make your listing photography any different from the hundreds of others you are competing against.  So, get higher.

This is easier said than done, and too dramatic of a change will look strange.  But even a shift upwards between 10-12 feet above street level is just enough to change the perspective noticeably.  One easy way is to use a ladder, but enterprising agents have come up with a few homebrew solutions that can take you even higher.  Check out this article from a RealTown group on pole arial photography along with some gorgeous shots from 30 feet up in the air.  Here’s an additional article on the do-it-yourself solution.

4. Take the Time and Edit Your Photos
As advanced as digital cameras are today, any picture you take still isn’t ideal.  That’s why it’s worth spending a bit of time on post-processing.  You don’t need to be a Photoshop expert to retouch your photos – in fact, unless you’re very tech-savvy, it’s probably better to stay away.  But there are a slew of free, powerful image editing software tools that are easy to use. 

One recommendation?  Check out Adobe Photoshop Express.  Though it shares a name with its full-featured sibling, this is a scaled-down, easy-to-use online image editing tool that doesn’t even require any software download.  Just upload a photo to the site, make your edits, and save.  Photoshop Express is great for quick tweaks to the contrast, brightness and saturation of your photo – all of which will make it pop more and stand out from the crowd.

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