Property photos must be top-notch to attract the best buyers and sellers. But the best professional photographers can be expensive, so many agents take their own photos – at least for their smaller homes.
A DIY approach (taking your own photos) has advantages.
- You will save money,
- With training and optimising, all your photos – even for smaller homes – can look amazing.
- You’re certain of getting all the scenes you want – even the best professionals don’t always capture everything unless they’re well-directed.
- No waiting. With DCTR, you can – because of AI – have them optimised and polished and ready to use within minutes of getting back to the office.
BUT – agents who take their own photos without having been trained, make frequent mistakes. Here’s a list of 7 x common errors that we see thousands of times a month when we’re editing and optimising agents' images.
We'll cover:
- Converging Verticals – this mistake could get you imprisoned
- Using Auto ISO – this can look like you’re looking through nylon stockings
- Not using a tripod for interiors – one of the reasons interiors can look blurry
- Appearing in reflections – ‘Please take the estate agent out of the oven”
- Photographing at the wrong time - sun behind.
- Not getting clients to tidy. – Unless you’re good with a feather duster, you’ll want to read this.
- Not polishing their photos
Want to know more? Take a look here for details of our property photography workshops. You'll learn how NOT to make the following mistakes and a lot more beside.
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Mistake 1/7
Converging verticals
If I were Prime Minister, I’d make this first mistake a criminal offence. It’s a phrase that always gets a laugh when I say it in my workshops. They think I’m joking!
Converging verticals, make your interiors appear as though they were designed by Khufu (architect of the Great Pyramid of Giza), and the effect is guaranteed to give me apoplexy as I scan through the portals. Look around your room now. Do your walls slope? Of course not. Neither should your photos make them look like they were taken by CCTV..
What’s the fix?
It’s very simple. Your camera’s lens needs to be parallel to the floor. Converging verticals happen when you point the camera up, or down. So, when a 6’7” agent walks into a room he (or she) will naturally point the camera down, otherwise, all they’ll photograph is the ceiling. So, the secret here is to take the photo from around 4’ off the ground (vary according to the furniture height) – lens parallel with the floor, line the verticals in the room up with the left and right edges of your screen and hey presto…
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Mistake 2/7
Using Auto ISO
Using Auto ISO will often make your photos look like they’re being viewed through nylon stockings - pixelated, broken into speckles, blurry, horrible – (the tech term is 'colour noise'). If your photos look like the one below when you look at them closely, that’s very likely because your ISO setting is set at Auto. DCTR gets requests all the time to fix photos like the one below – but there is no magic wand that can do that.
What's the fix?
The ISO setting in simple terms, lets you make your camera more sensitive to light and in turn, this means that you can use faster shutter speeds so that you can hand-hold your camera in low-light conditions. Sounds great – except it isn’t - because in low light, the camera will choose a very high setting and the higher the setting number, the worse the quality of your image will turn out. You need to control your ISO. If handholding, then you will need to see a shutter speed no slower than 1/30th of a second (wide-angle lens). If it’s slower than that then steadily increase the ISO until it gets there. Better still, use a tripod.
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Mistake 3/7
Not using a tripod
This mistake will be one reason why your interiors are blurry
Even CSI can’t sharpen photos that are very blurry. Don’t believe everything you see on TV.
When you use the best camera settings to give you sharp photos, in darker interiors your shutter speed will be too long to handhold your camera. Even if you THINK you can hold the camera still for long enough, you can’t. You NEED a tripod. Flash is an alternative, but most times flash is used badly. With flash you can make a white room look like a gentlemen’s toilet, which is where nobody wants to live. You’ll also flatten the shadows or send some shadows in the wrong direction so that your image looks bogus.
What's the fix?
Use a good tripod – one that doesn’t have skinny legs like celery sticks. Also, either user a timed shutter release (after pressing the release, it fires after 2 seconds), or better still, use a cable release. Cable releases are only a few quid on Amazon. It won’t matter what make it is so long as it fits your camera model.
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Mistake 4/7
Reflections
“Please take the estate agent out of the oven.”
DCTR gets asked to remove estate agents from ovens, shower screens, and glossy kitchens all the time.
When photographing anything that’s glossy, watch out that you’re not making an unintended guest appearance. Often, your reflection will turn up in bathroom mirrors, shower enclosures, ovens, and glossy kitchen units. If it’s not your face, it’ll be your body or feet or tripod. But most times, that’s avoidable.
What's the fix?
Firstly, you need to look carefully at what you’re about to photograph. I know that sounds obvious, but you’d surprised how many edits of this nature we carry out each day. Sometimes, there’s no way to get the camera or the tripod out of the shot, so those times, the image will need to be Photoshopped – but it’ll be easier and therefore cheaper if it’s only the tripod and camera rather than someone’s whole body that needs deleting. With a remote release, you can shoot without touching or even being near to the shutter release – perhaps stand to the side – hide or crouch. An alternative would be to use the camera’s timed shutter, set to release a couple of seconds after pressing the shutter release. If none of the above is possible then DCTR has your back – and your front – you can send the image to us, and we’ll airbrush you out – as if you were never there.
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Mistake 5/7
Photographing at the wrong time of day.
DCTR is always happy to help out when you get your photos wrong. But it’s better to get them right in the first place.
When the sun is behind a property, as with the house below, it casts a shadow and as you can see, that has made this white house appear as though it’s been Smurfe’d. The reason is that light, in very simplistic terms, comes in different colours. Shadow has a blue colour cast and that will make your exterior pics look cold and uninviting.
What’s the fix?
Take the photo at a better time of day. There are phone apps that you can use to tell you when that will be. My fave’ is LightTrac. Best download it from theApp Store. Just put the house address in and place the cursor over the elevation to see the optimal time to be there with your camera. If the back of the house faces due south and it is winter, then chances are the sun will be behind the property all day. So, your best bet in those circumstances would be to photograph the house on a cloudy day when the Sun’s harsh light will be shaded.
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Mistake 6/7
Not getting the owner to prepare for the photography
I can’t think of anyone who’d try to sell their car with fish & chip paper in the footwell but oddly, many owners just don’t think about preparing their home for the photos. You shouldn’t really be moving their toothbrushes and you probably wouldn’t want to move cat litter trays or do their washing up. So, if you want to avoid your photos looking like the lower deck of Noah’s Ark after a nasty storm and if you want to avoid wasting your money trying to sell something that looks like a teenager’s bedroom, and if you’re not much cop with a feather duster then you need a plan.
What’s the fix?
You need to motivate the vendor. This leaflet is one way to do that. The most important information is on the front page. This explains the What’s In It For Me? Reason for the owners to make that special effort. The best motivation is that the better the photos, the better the chance of optimising their selling price. Great photos certainly can’t increase a property’s value but bad photos sure as heck can decrease it. We can rebrand the leaflet to your business and we’ll host it on our Showdeck domain for a one-off fee of £150 + vat. DCTR customers paying by DD can buy them for £75 + vat.
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Mistake 7/7
Not optimising photos or getting them optimised
Not many people know this, but every photo that comes out of a camera needs to be optimised so that it looks its best. On average, 75/80% of a high-quality photo is the result of the technique used to take it. The other 20/25% is the result of optimising it either by hand in Photoshop, or by using AI. The Doctor Photo (DCTR) Studio platform offers AI and that allows customers to Facelift, say, 50 photos in 3 minutes.
…What’s the fix?
If you're sad, like me, you'll do what I did and you'll firefight your sales during the day, then work until 3am most days on optimising photos. These days, if you'd prefer to spend your time with family, and if you want you images to look amazing, you'll use DCTR. At least I have the excuse that back before 2005 there was no DCTR around to help out. Doctor Photo (DCTR as we are now) was the world's first platform to specialise in improving property photos.
Get in touch if you would like to learn how to take pro-standard photos for yourself. Drop John an email at John@dctr.co.uk if you have any questions.
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