5 tips for taking pictures of your house (for Funda or Jaap)
Do you want to sell your home and do it yourself in this bizarre market without a sales agent? That’s fine. You too can, even with your smartphone, make sure your house looks good. That means a few things, including good preparation. With these tips you can put your house in the picture, so that a potential buyer can already see himself living there.
Contents
1. Think about the preparation
Taking pictures of your home is a bit like painting your walls: you often spend a long time preparing, but you reap the benefits once you put that fluffy paint roller on the wall. Besides the fact that you have to tidy up and clean a lot because you want to ensure that your appearance is as ‘bare’ as possible, it is also essential to make a list of all the rooms in your house. This way you make sure you don’t forget to photograph anything. Balconies, roof terraces, but also something as simple as the side of your home, in addition to all the spaces inside, of course.
It may seem a bit boring, but precisely because there are no frills, you have a very clear picture of the space.
2. Go for the corners
This concerns both the wide angles (ie the wide-angle lens) and the corners of the room. It is simply very nice when a house is nice and spacious. Sometimes wide angle is your enemy, especially when you have something in the edges of the photo that is blown completely out of proportion. But in general, the wide-angle lens knows how to set up your house just a little bit better than a normal lens. Certainly toilets and other small rooms: otherwise you often just can’t get them on at all. The wide-angle lens is your best friend. Also make sure that you don’t photograph too much from a bird’s eye view: sometimes a room seems smaller, so take a look at what it looks like if you photograph a bit more at viewing height or from a slightly lower perspective.
Here you can also see the difference between wide-angle and non-wide-angle:
Typically a photo in which the wide-angle lens is not your friend: in addition to the fact that it is already a bit messy, the bottle in the foreground takes on a strange shape and takes far too much attention.
3. Think perspective
Do you have a nice staircase in your living room, or a special arch that splits your living room in two? It is not obligatory to post only one photo of each room on Funda and Jaap: such a special element can be shown for a while and can actually ensure that you don’t just have those ‘square’ room photos, but actually give something more context: so there’s the stairs: aha, and that’s the kitchen door. It’s nice for the human brain to get some perspective. Moreover, it is also often beautiful in the photo itself: a room looks much richer if a staircase can be seen at the top: that can give a very spatial effect.
For example, you can see that the arch is apparently near the sleeping area: you don’t see that if you only photograph the bedroom (although the cushion mass on the couch is a bit too much).
By photographing a piece of stairs, the viewer gets more information about what is where.
4. Shoot in daylight
You have a busy life: you work during the day and then you want to shoot those photos in the evening, because then it’s done. Really try to wait until the weekend, until you can take pictures in daylight: it makes a world of difference. You want to show your rooms, not your mood lights, in addition to the fact that a house can quickly look a bit dingy at dusk, or unintentionally romantic or sexy. It’s nice to photograph in daylight, because that’s when your house looks the brightest and most open, and that makes it much easier for people to get a good picture of your house. By the way, if your photos still come out a bit dark, you could lighten them a bit (really a little bit) in a photo editing program.
It comes across as sultry unintentionally, in addition to the fact that the space seems a lot smaller by not photographing it in daylight.
5. Remember the don’ts
When photographing your home you can sometimes start thinking too detailed. A photo on which your bank is in the picture, of course, is of no use to a buyer, because he brings his own bank. This is about photography of space, not of your interior. However, there are many parts of your interior that you probably have to move around. That garbage can or litter box in your pantry: remove it for the photo: people are not waiting for unsavory pictures. The most important tip is to remove personal photos as much as possible. That is a big plus for your privacy, but also makes it easier for the potential buyer to see themselves living there, instead of getting the feeling that they are peeping into the neighbors. Other tips are to watch out for reflections: whether it concerns television screens, windows or mirrors: make sure that you, as a photographer, cannot be seen.
Very nice, those bright blue-green details, but it takes over the whole picture. So open the curtain wide.
Very nice, that Frank Ocean poster, but potential buyers really don’t need to see such personal details. In addition to the fact that the chosen duvet cover with its intense red hue also takes over.
Got it: watch out for reflections.
More photography tips
Want more photography tips? This way you can shoot beautiful snapshots of the beach, or of your eye (iris photos). Do you prefer pictures of food, mountains on winter sports, the northern lights, a concert or flowers? That is also possible, unless you prefer to get tips about selfies of course. Or rather macro photos of insects.
Do you have any good tips for taking beautiful photos of a home? Leave them now in the comments.
