In case you are selling your home, condo, vacation dwelling, your office suite, store or the like and want to provide your realtor or your prospect buyers with photographs, or you want to create photographs for your marketing campaigns of your interior spaces, following you will find some tips that may be helpful in making better photographs:
- Walk around within the space, spend time in some of the areas and see which perspective feels the best to you
- Seek out an interesting angle of the room / space as opposed to shooting dead on
- Arrange the furniture and accessories of the space you are photographing and “unclutter” it. Keep the golden rule of “Less is More” in mind.
- Add a flower bouquet or a bowl of fruit, or any other uplifting accessories to your arrangement and let it be discretely visible in the shot (as opposed to smack in the foreground).
- Oftentimes it is helpful to turn the lights on even during daytime. When dealing with numerous different light sources at the same time (daylight + incandescent + neon + candle etc.) in many cases the least problematic approach is to dial the white balance setting on your camera to “Auto”.
- If possible, try to avoid using your built in flash, unless you have a really good one or several good supplemental ones. In many cases the built in flash provides an uneven lighting effect as it overpowers the main center area or foreground of the picture but keeps the remainder of the scene dark. To create even and balanced lighting is an art.
- Experiment with the different exposure settings on your camera, i.e. auto, manual, aperture priority etc. Notice the different results. For me, the one that provides the best results in most cases is either “manual” or “aperture priority”. When you opt to shoot on manual setting, keep in mind that the longer your exposure time becomes the more likely you will require the stabilizing support of a tripod or some other stabilizing device. When shooting in aperture priority mode, make sure your aperture is set on a minimum of 5.6 or preferably even higher.
- If your camera or lens provides you with zooming capabilities, experiment with those as well. Contrary to common belief the widest angle is not always the most advantageous.
- Shoot with the light and not into it, in other words, try to shoot away from windows and into the rooms from the window.
- Compose for the “feel” of the space and what grabs you most about it and not so much for the conventional belief what others would want to see.
- “Comb” your scene on the edges along the frame of your viewfinder or screen to make certain that you do not have unwanted objects poking into your picture frame.
- Try to hold your camera straight on a horizontal axis and consider to get down on your knees as opposed to tilting the camera and shooting down into the scene as this distorts the even lines of your composition.
- Depending on what the final application of your photographs is and how good of a job you did, you may want to edit your final picture choices in one of the many photo editing software packages available, i.e. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom or even the ones that come preloaded on your computer. Experiment, experiment, experiment…
These are some of the most important things that come to my mind that can have a strong positive impact on your approach and final results and it is my hope that they may be helpful to you. And if you have a specific question, feel free to post it.
And if you do not want to spend all the time and effort in creating a satisfactory or outstanding photograph, hire a professional architectural photographer. Superb architectural photography requires the consideration of seemingly countless technical as well as artistic and aesthetic aspects which the pros have mastered over the years of being in business. You can see more examples of outstanding architectural photography here.
Happy clicking!
