There’s always something to howl about.

Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words, but what are your pictures actually saying?

Pictures are worth a thousand words. Wouldn’t it be nice if all thousand of those words were actually in praise for the subject of the picture? Time and time again I see photos of homes in the MLS that make me NOT want to look at the house, it’s either too dark or washed out or it just doesn’t make the house look appealing. Or it’s pictures of inconsequential things, like the seller’s dog, or a squirrel in the lawn, or 5 photos of the staircase and no other interior pictures. I swear I’ve seen pictures that were made by a camera phone.

What is the point of pictures in our line of work? It is to showcase the house. In this day and age when the vast majority of folks are going online to see everything they can about a house, the photos we have are your first impression. It can make a buyer drool and want to jump in the car to go see it right away, or it can make someone simply pass over it without a second thought. What kind of photos are you taking?

The options are pretty simple. Take good pictures or pay someone that can take good pictures. I was very close to start paying a professional photographer until I learned how to make astonishing photos myself. This isn’t for everyone, but it might work for some! So let me show you some examples.

Everett House

This one is your ordinary every-day split-level house. The picture on the left was pulled from when the house was for sale 4 years ago. It has nothing wrong with it. It’s actually fairly well exposed in that you can see the house clearly. However it’s kinda plain and split-level homes here have a certain negative stigma. The photo on the right is of the same house that I am listing now. This house has a gorgeous front yard and the goal was to emphasize the overall property’s beauty and de-emphasize the split-levelness. The house is small in the overall photo, but the goal was to catch the viewer’s attention so they will click on more photos and then be turned on to the inner beauty of the house. Instead, someone could easily see a plain old split-level home (seen one…seen them all) and pass right over it…not knowing what they might have missed.

Chung

These townhomes are pretty new so that I couldn’t find a photo of it from when it was originally sold. The next best thing I did find was a photo of the unit next door to the one I have listed. Again, nothing really wrong with the picture on the left except the sky is overexposed (all white) and it just looks like any ordinary ho-hum townhouse. I tried to get a little bit of mother nature to help spruce up my version of the picture…some trees in the background and blue skies.

Lee

Here is an example of when a good wide angle lens comes in handy. The photo on the left taken in a previous listing doesn’t even have the whole house in the picture. The effect I was going for here was to have all the lights glowing…again to be an eye catcher.

stairs

The photo on the left is of the same staircase as the one I took on the right. The staircase is actually pretty neat and the photo on the left fails to communicate any of that…there’s even barrel distortion at the left and right edges of the picture (see how the walls aren’t straight?).

So how are these photos done? True, these are not “natural” photos. Depending on the sunlight, you don’t typically get a scene where both foreground, house and sky are all well exposed. If the sun is behind the house, you’ll usually get a sky that’s well exposed and the house is dark. Or the opposite, where the house is properly exposed and the sky is washed out. Here’s my secret. It requires a few tools. 1) a camera that allows you to manually set its exposure, 2) some software and 3) a tripod.

The technique used here is called HDR. High Dynamic Range photography. It basically involves taking several shots of the same image at different exposures. The idea is that at different exposures, different parts of the image will be properly exposed. Once you have your set of pictures, you feed them into the software and it merges them all together. You then have to go and tweak the picture to get different things to show up better. Easy as pie. There’s various versions of the software. You can get a photoshop plugin or a stand-alone. I use
HDRsoft’s standalone package. The software is the easy part. Getting a cheap digital camera to take differntly exposed photos is tricky and would involve lots of menu button presses (which is where the tripod comes in). You need all your shots to be the same. Too much movement and the software won’t be able to properly mash them together.

The camera I use is a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400D for those non-US readers). The easiest way to take multiple-exposure shots is using the camera’s built in auto-bracketing feature. On the Canon XTi it will automatically fire off 3 shots at the 3 different exposures I set it to.

Here’s some examples of the three shots used to make the pictures I have above. Each one captures a different set of detail in the photo (the set on the right is more clear) and software creates a picture with all the details highlighted. The trial and error part is figuring out how to tweak and what to tweak to get the best looking results.

6grid

So there you go. I’m nowhere near an expert at this technique …I’m still learning!! Go to flickr and search for ‘HDR’ if you want to see the stuff the pros can do with this technique.

So why not just hire it out? You can. Like I said, this isn’t for everyone. I personally do it to increase my value to my clients and also so I have an excuse to buy the camera gear I’ve always wanted. Happy picture taking!