Lessons

Lesson Info

Key Lesson: What Photos Do You Need to Capture?

What photos do you need to capture for a real estate photography shoot. You are taking the viewer through a tour of the house, make those room connections with your photography. This is probably one of the most important things to take away from this lesson. Beyond just you need to take XYZ number of photos per room. Remember you're taking viewers through a tour without video. So if you have video, that's great. But if you're not doing video, then it's important for viewers to be able to sense. OK, I can go from this room to that room. This is how the kitchen connects with the living space. This is how the primary bedroom connects to the bathroom, all of those kinds of things that are helpful as a viewer. So that's one of the first things when you walk into a space, make sure that if there's open hallways, if there's open rooms and walls that connect the kitchen to the living space, you want to make sure you show those. But in terms of the basic for each room, I recommend at least one ...

wide shot. Obviously, this is like the basics you just need at least one wide shot, but you generally want to show two angles per room. So this is a times from opposite corners. So you can see the entire room. If you go from one corner to the opposite corner, get a wide shot, you got that whole room covered. Sometimes you might want to go for what's called a one point or flat perspective. If there is a wall or something in the room that caters to this, some examples of this are this great uh sink and the mirrors, it looks great having this one flat perspective where you're shooting perpendicular to a wall. Here's another example of where you're not shooting from the corner of a space, but this is taken from a flat perspective. Here's another one, it's a definitely a little bit more of a designer look where there's art on the wall. Although you can see the reflection of this photographer's camera in that, that painting. So you wanna be careful of that. It's harder to do that, get rid of reflections or not be in a reflection if you are shooting in flat perspective. Now let's go room by room and talk about how many photos you need for each room. This is just a general rule of thumb. You might take 5, 10 photos per room, but in terms of delivery or if you are selling a space yourself, this is generally what real estate agents want. So you'll want four photos of a kitchen, the kitchen sells the house a lot of times, especially if it's a nice kitchen, of course. And so you'll want four photos of that and this isn't just going to be just wide angle photos from corners. Potentially, you're going to have more detail shots of certain appliances that are sell the space again for bathrooms, you'll want two photos of each bathroom for bedrooms. One is generally enough, but you know, take them from opposite corners if you can two of the primary bedroom. So this is the main biggest bedroom of the house. You want to have two of those, you want to have your laundry room, you wanna have, I would say more than one photo for the big living spaces. This is another selling point of a lot of houses. So having multiple photos of that and then one of any other room. So if there's offices, dens basements, that kind of thing, even a garage, you, you'll want to have at least one photo of that. Here's an example of two different photos of the same space. The one on the left is great because you can see what's outside that window and that's probably the selling photo of this room. But the one on the right shows that connection between the kitchen and the dining space which you don't see in that photo on the left, here's a great photo showing the connection of the dining space to the living space to the kitchen, the open concept, very American thing that is very popular. Now, um I'm not sure if it's as popular around the world. Let me know if it's a thing yet. But this photo is great for showing that connection of the room, but it's not a great photo of each individual room itself. You'd want to have specific photo of the kitchen of the living space, of the dining area as well. Here's another one that shows that connection of the living space to what's beyond the dining room and the kitchen. So that's what these examples are. Just examples of showing those connections of the room and then beyond those wider connection shots, which might be in addition to the photos of each room, then you might be getting photos of specific details of a room. So for here, this example, it looks like there's an office set up in a bedroom that's kind of cool to show this would be more, I don't know for selling the house, but more for like a short term rental that you might want to show. Here's a photo of the pantry, here's a photo of a bathroom. Um From this perspective, you don't see the tub, so you'd want to make sure you flop over and get the photo of the tub itself as well. Um But this perspective, you see that there is a tub there, which is great and then you also see the main visual details of a bathroom which are generally the the sinks, the shower as well. Here's a more flat one point perspective of a kitchen showing the general space of the kitchen. You're not getting a great shot of the oven. Here, I would also probably try to widen out or back up if possible in this photo so that you can see more of that space on the right. You don't see what this room is connected to. This is actually an example of a photo. I'm not a huge fan of because while you're kind of seeing the space of the kitchen, um sometimes when you get a little too close to the countertops, it just looks they take up too much space in the photo, which is unnecessary. I probably would have if I just wanted the photo of the kitchen, gone back to the right a bit and just angled it a little bit more from more of like the corner to see that oven range to see. And you still see the cabinets, the fridge, the sink as well. Sometimes it's better though to take a photo from that perspective instead of the corner of a room. And this is an example of that where it's nice to be able to see straight down this galley kitchen, you still see the details, the left and the right, but you're centered on what the highlight of this photo is and that is that window and the little breakfast, dining nook that's in front of the window. Here's a photo that I'm not a huge fan of. I'm showing you the pros cons what I like what I don't like about certain photos. I like that. You can see the range. It's highlighting the oven range and then also the backslash, but it's kind of like wanting to do too much. They're trying to show also on the left, it looks like an island but and then the sink is sort of squished over to the left side of the frame. I would have rather just backed up and gotten the whole photo with the island with the oven range with the sink in the window that's on the left because right now this photos so seems like it's just trying to highlight the oven and the range and the backslash. But if you're gonna do that just just flatten out and take that photo rather than try to do everything. So we talked about the interior of the house. Let's talk about the exterior of the house. Generally you're gonna be shooting at eye level outside, not at waste because the space is just bigger. You're taking photos of the house, it's bigger. So you're gonna be shooting at eye level, you're gonna capture three wide photos, one from the left, one from the right and then one centered on the house itself. And these are going to be sort of wider photos of the entire house then you're going to pop in and go a little bit closer to the entrance of the house and get that door and if it's connected to like a porch or a patio that's on the front, you want to do that and then back up even further and get sort of a property line photo where you can see a little bit of the edge of the property, maybe even the buildings or houses on the side depending on what the neighborhood looks like. Of course, just to give it more context of what's that space look like. So here's some examples of that from the left, right center. These are a bit far back on that left and right. I might have gone in a little bit closer. That one on the right is nice. But see how that one on the right, you're the footer is closer to the curb and you really see like just the walkway up to the house, the one on the left you're seeing mostly the street. You don't really need to see that. And I would have tilted up a little bit on those two shots. The left and the right because the top of the house is being a little bit cut off. But a good example of like getting that left center and right shot. Here's an example of that left front shot as well. These houses are really close together. One of the things that I'll talk about is trying to show the depth of the house if you can from those angled shots. That's why we get those angled shots as well as the center on shot. Um to be able to see that depth as well. Here, you can see a little bit better of the depth of the house on that left side of the frame. Here is back at this photo, this or this house. This is a good example of the whole house photo. And then also that popping in close to the entry way, I might have even gone a little bit closer to highlight that porch or taken a separate photo of that porch as well. Here's a great photo showing the depth of a house and this one probably just makes this, it highlights the house better than just straight on. Of course, you want to take both of those photos as well. Here's a straight on photo just to show you the difference of what a straight on photo looks like. Here is one that's a little bit closer up as well. Showing that entry way. Here is one of the entryway itself. Another thing to consider when you're taking exterior photos is the lighting. So you don't have as much control of the lighting in some sense because you're dependent on the sun if and the weather. And so how that weather is that day will determine what your photo looks like. That being said, you can try to take your photos at different times of the day to highlight your house. So here is a great shot of this house which at night with all the lights, with these big great windows, it really is a selling point for this house. This might not work for a lot of houses. They might not have the big windows that show the interior of the space at dusk at during this like blue hour, which is the time right after sunset and also the cloudy sky looks a little ominous. So if I were taking this photo and you had the option to, I would take it again a different day when it wasn't cloudy. But this nighttime shot is pretty cool. So then we've got our exterior fresh shots, but we need the backyard shots as well if there is a backyard. So same thing left right center from eye line, you want to get that of the house. So the left right and center, but then you want to back up, go to the corners of the property. If there is a nice backyard space and get that whole backyard connected to the house from those corner, this is gonna be different on any every home. Uh I'm talking about like a typical American suburb where it's just like a box. But of course, this is going to look different if you're, you're somewhere else in the world. If you're taking photos of an apartment building, if you're taking a photo of a big farmland, rural area, but generally just photos that show the backyard space plus the house if they have that space and then one photo for each feature of the backyard. So if there's a pool, a deck, patio, garage, et cetera, taking photos of those individually and highlighting those is important. So here is an example of uh the same house that we've seen the front from. So the one on the left, this is a photo uh from the back corner of the property and then the one on the right, this is from more close to the house, but it shows the backyard space connected to the garage which we haven't seen or that garage, sort of granny flat ad U kind of thing you see in the back. Um That's a nice perspective as well. So if there is a feature in the backyard that you want to highlight, make sure you're highlighting that here. They even took a photo from across the alley as well to show that entrance to the garage, which is kind of neat to have. Here is a great patio. These are just photos of features. You want to showcase the pool and the pool's connection to the house. Here's another photo taken later in the day where the lighting within the house really highlights the house. But of course, this is a house again, big open windows, lots of light from the interior that really highlights that house not gonna work for a lot of properties. This is a great little selling point to an Airbnb short term rental um or even to selling a house. But this great little patio gazebo type thing. Very good to highlight if you are shooting with a drone, I want to cover this really quickly. So aerial drone photos, I'll use that term interchangeably. Aerial is really just any photo taken from the sky. Uh drone is with a drone. You generally want to have one photo of the front of the house, one of the backyard and then also a neighborhood location shot. So this might be one that's zoomed out quite a bit where it sort of pinpoints where the property is in the context of the neighborhood, especially if it's close to any sort of cool feature like uh nature, if it's close to the mountains, if it's close to the downtown area of a certain town, being able to connect the dot of Here's the location to that cool feature of the the town with a photo is very, very cool. All right, with all that being said, I think it's time to get started with some photo demonstrations. So in the next lessons, I'm going to be taking photos of the interior space of my house that I live in. I'm very lucky enough to have a house that I think is worthwhile photographing and it'll be a good example of a common approach of taking photos with furniture in them already stylized, got photos on the wall, things like that. So there might be things where you might not run into with like the photos on the wall. You generally don't want to have family photos in your real estate photos. But in the future lessons, I'm also going to be taking photos of of another space without any furniture which will be completely different in terms of the approach of taking the photos, much more simple and also for editing the photos a little bit easier as well. So um looking forward to that and we'll see in those lessons.