Are you getting enough value out of your real estate photographer?
Time to step on some toes here…
Something we’ve noticed, and I believe consumers are also beginning to notice, is the fact that real estate photography has started to find itself in a pretty intense rut. Go to any real estate agent’s Instagram page, or peruse your local area on Zillow, and you’ll see what I mean. Photos are your typical wide angle shots that get overly edited to where they start to look just about as intense as the cover art for The Wizard of Oz.
Yikes. That’s not a digital mock-up, that’s an overly edited photo of a house. It might be a little bit of an extreme example, but I think we’ve all seen examples that are a bit much in the industry.
There are a few questions you should ask yourself about your photographer to see if they’re giving you the value that you’re paying for.
Are they being intentional with the time of day they take their pictures?
Time of day can be a very serious factor to consider when presenting a house. Everyone knows that things simply look better at sunset, but why is that? It’s because of the way the sun refracts light through the air, and how it gets obscured and diffused by our atmosphere the lower it gets to the horizon. Thanks to the dust in the air, it also causes a pleasant golden haze to be applied to all of the light coming from the sun. In mid-day, when the sun is directly overhead, we actually start to see some severe disadvantages to our photography. For one, the sun is just a force to be reckoned with as far as exposure. Bright concrete, bright skies, and really dark, contrasty shadows. We really want those to be smoothed out, so that’s why we at basik MEDIA shoot for later hours in the day. We actually shoot for the hour after sunset, called the “blue hour”. While this time isn’t really optimal for portraits, it’s actually a great candidate for real estate photography. That’s because there’s still enough light coming from the sun to see details in the sky, but also to take advantage of the hazel glow of the interior lights that will be coming from inside the house. This hour can be the perfect “best of both worlds” scenario for real estate photography between taking a night shot and a day shot.
A Good example of “blue hour” real estate photgraphy
2. Are they considering the effects their effects can cause?
Is the photographer that you use overusing HDR editing? (That’s what the Wizard of Oz example I used earlier is guilty of) Is he/she guilty of leaning to heavily on wide angles?
It’s no secret that color sells, and that making things look bigger with the right lenses helps sell a property. I think the fact that it’s no secret, however, has started to become more of a burden than a help with the average consumer. Most people have had to move in the last decade, and they’ve already figured out the trick. The photos on the website make the house look so spacious, but as soon as they see the property in real life, they’re disappointed. The jig is up.
So sure, we still use wide angles to make sure we get everything in frame, but we need to start examining our work to determine if we’re overdoing it. This problem of not being able to get as much as possible in frame can also be solved with creative framing of a photo, and also real estate videography.
Also, overdoing the color has become another way that the industry has begun to leave a bad taste in the mouth of the consumer. There’s nothing wrong with making sure the image looks good, and even using Photoshop in creative ways. There is just a line somewhere that we shouldn’t cross. For us, the line is replacing the sky. Sometimes we get grey clouds here in Oklahoma, or clear skies. Depending on what we’re going for, this can actually be a bit of a disappointment, so we replace the sky with something just a little bit more picturesque. This doesn’t cross the dishonesty line, though, because the sky is ever-changing. The lawn however, will never be that nuclear green we see in so many other examples of badly photoshopped real estate photgraphy. That’s where we’ve crossed the line into dishonesty.
3. Are they paying attention to the details?
Something we at basik MEDIA pride ourselves in is our attention to detail. We always ask our clients what they want to highlight about their home. New crown molding? A stunning chandelier? We always try to sprinkle with our albums of our homes little vignettes that really help the consumer get the vibe of the space. It seems to me that so many real estate photographers of late, however, have the idea that what they need to do is “spray and pray” and be done with the house in 15 minutes. Good for them, they got their check, but how was their work? Was it satisfactory, or was it exceptional? So this has been a mission of ours since we started doing this - to be detail oriented.
In Conclusion…
We hope you’ll take these ideas to heart and consider them. We want to push the real estate photography (and real estate videography) industry into its next competitive level. Of course, these are ideas that you can bring up with your photographer, or if you’re in the Oklahoma/Texas area, we’d love to have the pleasure of working with you ourselves. Stay tuned for our next article discussing videography!