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How To Photograph Real Estate

Tools and techniques for better interior architectural photographs

This Article Features Photo Zoom

My real-estate agent recently asked what camera and lens I used to photograph my Homes For Sale listing. These tools and skills can be useful for lots of people, so I decided to write about it here. Even if you never plan to sell your home, keep reading for my suggestions on making better photographs of interiors and exteriors of any kind of real estate.

- Start with a full-frame camera and a wide-angle lens. Why full frame? Because the crop factor of a smaller sensor will make it harder to get ultrawide, which is necessary for interior photographs—and especially necessary for small spaces. Wide-angle lenses expand scenes and help make rooms look larger too. I find that 20mm is great for most home interior spaces, though I can get away with 24mm on some larger rooms. Even wider 17mm or even 15mm lenses are helpful for the tiniest spaces you're faced with if you hope to render them in any meaningful fashion.

- Consider adding a specialized lens like a tilt/shift for minimizing distortion and controlling perspective. I regularly use a 24mm tilt/shift lens when I'm photographing architecture and interiors because I can use it to approximate the traditional movements of a view camera. When a wide-angle lens isn't held perfectly parallel to the vertical planes in a room, the room will appear to distort dramatically. That means pointing a lens up or down to show the most important areas in a room can cause unpleasant distortion. The perspective control of a tilt/shift lens eliminates this distortion in camera, without the need for any post-production adjustment.

- Don't forget a flash. I used a hot-shoe-mounted handheld strobe to help illuminate the spaces in my home. But I didn't rely on the flash as the key light; rather, it was simply a bit of fill. To start, pick the right time of day to get bright, light-filled spaces. This may require a bit of pre-planning so you'll know when a given room looks its best and doesn't suffer from direct, harsh, contrasty sunlight. Then use the flash as a fill light for added edge definition and color fidelity. A manual setting is fine if you're comfortable adjusting the power of your flash according to the results you see on the LCD, or you can use your flash's TTL metering with exposure compensation to dial in just the right amount of fill. Either way, point the flash straight up to let it bounce off of white ceilings and provide soft, attractive illumination without any harsh shadows or unflattering effects.

- If you're purchasing a kit to shoot architectural interiors, you'll definitely want to add a sync cord to your shopping list. Though I primarily use my flash on the camera, I sometimes tether it to a TTL sync cord to get the flash off axis, and/or point it directly at specific too-dark areas within the scene. Need to add an edge of highlight to the dark dining room table? No problem; just hold the flash low and fire away for a splash of fill until it looks perfect.

- Watch your white balance. While you usually want every light in a room to be illuminated, if you're struggling with matching white balance perfectly you may be able to get away with turning off interior lights and relying on the fill flash and window light to create a bright and airy look in each room. I use a simple gray card photographed in each scene—especially if I left on lights—to ensure that I could make one-click white-balance changes in post-processing. The other approach is to simply match the white balance preset to the type of light you're using—like daylight with a flash. Either way, automatic white balance adjustments can be fooled in many mixed lighting situations, so I recommend using manual settings for maximum accuracy.

- I didn't use a tripod. That's probably not great advice for most of your photographic needs, because a tripod will allow you to really make precise compositions and to shoot at small apertures and longer shutter speeds. But for my purposes, I cranked the ISO knowing that the small size my pictures would be printed would hide any noise, and I shot at wider apertures and faster shutter speeds. In the end I was able to work more quickly and make more compositional variations in each room. This helped me to create an overall beautiful, natural, light-filled impression of my home. It did require that I contort myself into some tight corners to get just the right angle, but that was easier done without worrying about positioning a tripod too.

- Don't forget the exteriors. For the outside shots of my home I chose an early morning shoot with dappled sunlight filtering through the trees and making for a more visually interesting, charming and hopefully appealing photograph. If you want a rich blue sky, or to ensure that the colors in your home really come through, use a polarizer. Make sure you're not shooting toward the sun as this will cause flare and flatten both color saturation and tonal contrast. Try to get far enough away from the structure to minimize the distortion that occurs when shooting close up with wide lenses, and use that tilt/shift lens if it's available. When all else fails, go for a long exposure after dusk. With all of the interior lights on, the house will really glow warmly against the deep blue dusk sky, and that's sure to be an eye-catcher in any real estate listing.

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