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I recently put my house on the market. I’m a photographer. Naturally, one thing immediately popped into my mind when it came time to list the house…taking my own photos of the house. I’ve been toying with the idea of breaking into real estate photography for a little while, and thought that moving to Colorado would make a good starting point for that venture. Since I had to get my own home looking nice for sale, it would make a good guinea pig.

During my research for this new venture, I stumbled across a real estate photography blog, aptly named Photography For Real Estate written by Larry Lohrman. Larry knows his stuff, and I spent hours scouring his blog for useful information that I could use in my own photos. He was even nice enough to provide me a little feedback on the job I’d done, mentioning that the photos were good for a first time, though I needed to ensure that all vertical surfaces remained vertical in the photos. Mental note taken. If you ever need to do any kind of architectural photography, check out Larry’s site before you do.

So here are a couple of the interior shots from my own house. Here’s my living room:

As you can see, those verticals aren’t vertical, due to the angle of the camera. I could easily fix this in Photoshop, which I will do next time. This was a flash lit photo. I had a 430EX directly to my right pointing up into the ceiling. My Vivitar 285HV flash was in the hallway on the opposite side of the living room pointed into the ceiling. The shutter speed was determined based on the light coming in from the windows, though admittedly that half moon window above the door is way too hot.

Here’s my master bedroom. Yep, you get to see where I sleep.

Again, the shutter speed was set for the windows, and a flash was bounced into the wall/ceiling to my left. Gotta get those verticals straight.

One more, to demonstrate a fun technique, here’s my bathroom:

Everything on the others applies here. But this photo was actually two photos. Notice how the bedroom in the mirror is well lit in addition to the bathroom. I took one photo with the flash in the bathroom. Then, with the camera still on the tripod, I moved the flash to the bedroom and took another shot. Now I had two shots, one with a lit bathroom and a dark bedroom, and another with a lit bedroom and a dark bathroom. I then brought both photos into Photoshop, put each one on a layer in the same image, and set the blend mode to “Lighten”. This let’s the lit up areas show through from both photos. It’s that easy. This was a very fun technique to play with, even though I had the lights to use.

When I presented the photos to my broker he was ecstatic. The simple truth about real estate is that photos of homes suck. Badly. Having good photos of your house really makes a difference in getting traffic through the front door. I think that these photos made a difference in the listing of my home.

UPDATE: Last night (12/26) we got an offer on the house. Not bad considering it’s been on the market a week in a housing market that is taking months to sell. Could the pictures have helped? I like to think so…