Part Six - The Master Bedroom

Welcome to part six of our twenty two part miniseries on real estate photography and the role that it plays in marketing a home.  Today we are going to look at a master bedroom from a local listing, taken with a point and shoot camera, and then critique it and compare it to a shot from my site, PG Listings.ca

I'm feeling rather saucy tonight, so I think I'll turn things up to eleven and choose a higher end master bedroom, something that you might walk around in wearing a silk kimono, puffing away on your ivory tusk hand carved pipe while doing morning pilates....So with the goal of evoking that kind of imagery, lets have a look.

I don't know about my faithful readers, but this home, which is slightly under $400,000, is underwhelming to me.  That price point will get you a pretty nice place in this town, so it is alarming to see this kind of image.  In fact, I would almost go so far as to say that this image makes me want to visit the house even less than if there were no images at all!  What we have here is a classic case of the camera trying to expose both the bright windows and the dark interior at the same time, but it's little wee sensor can't handle the range in brightness, so it tries to split the difference, resulting in blown out windows anyway (which can be nice in certain situations), and a dark room, which is never nice.

Fun Fact: Turning on the lamp will do wonders for both the overall light levels, and it will add warmth and character to a shot.  Visualize the shot above with the bedside lamp on for a moment - It seems much nicer doesn't it?

Anyway, here's a shot from a similar price bracket from PG Listings.ca

Booyah!  If you don't want to don slippers and do pirouettes in this baby then you aren't a pillow loving human! Total difference in asking price is about $15,000 (my shot is from the more expensive home) and the difference in perceived value - priceless.  Actually, it's not priceless, I'm sure there is a quantifiable figure that can be applied, but whatevs.  To make a shot like this requires some off camera flash units as well as knowledge of photoshop - because you'll need to do some touch up after the image is taken.  This takes time, which is one thing that an active real estate agent does not have a lot of.

An ancient and wise real estate agent once blogged that the effective realtor applies 10% of the total commission toward marketing the home, and when you look at the kinds of dramatic differences that can be manifested by using a competent real estate photographer, that's good return on investment (I'm not biased)

Well that's it for today, I hope you are enjoying our two part series on home real estate photography, and I look forward to your comments!  Now it's time to don that robe and slippers!

Daniel Abraham
PG Listings.ca

Part Five - The Bedroom

This is going to be a lot of fun for me.  As a real estate photographer, I have seen a lot of bedrooms and I have to say that if there is one room that two minutes of prep work can work wonders on, it's this one.  The kitchen and bathrooms take a little more time because some things might be wet or covered in bio hazardous slime, but everything in a bedroom can usually be kicked under something or into something, making prep work a breeze.  In case you weren't already aware, we spend quite a bit of time sleeping and doing other things in a bedroom, so it ranks right up there in terms of 'rooms that really should look good to attract people to the home'.

So let's get right down to it.  As usual, I have snooped around the local active listings and drummed up a real winner this time.  Check this bad boy out.

From a technical standpoint, this image has some issues....
Most notable, the individual that took this shot failed to notice that about one sixth of the image is dominated by the door frame - which I suppose could have been done on purpose because they wanted to show that the home does indeed come with door frames, which is useful to know.

On the other hand, showing the door frame at an angle does not inspire confidence, and in fact, it appears that the whole house may be on an angle - Oh my! I can't live in a house that is on an angle!

So there are a couple of issues, all of which are glaringly obvious. First, the home doesn't come with a wardrobe so take the three minutes and move it from the right side of the frame.  Second, unless the home is on an angle, don't market it as such.  Finally, although door frames are handy, it is commonly assumed that homes have them already, so they don't need to be in the shot.  These are in addition to the usual issues from point and shoot cameras - drab colors, underexposure, and flash hot spots.

So let's have a look at a shot from PG Listings.ca from a similar price bracket.

Ok, so the price bracket here is pretty low, so the shots in general don't have a lot to show, but there are some pretty major differences between these two shots - differences that really only come down to an additional five minutes of time.  Move the stuff, straighten the bed out, and compose the image properly...That's mostly it.  Granted, the PG Listings shot underwent some enhancement in photoshop, but what we're looking at in today's example is more about composition than post processing. As I usually state, if a consumer were to look at these two images and choose one of these houses to visit in person, I strongly feel that they would pick the PG Listings home based on the quality of the pictures.

In case you were wondering, this shot was taken with one off camera flash, bounced off of one of the walls.  Unfortunately it created a shadow behind the lamp because the flash setting was quite high, but I had no choice here because I really wanted to catch the nice view out of the window.

Thanks for visiting, and tune in next time when we tackle the master bedroom!

Daniel Abraham
www.pglistings.ca