Tips for Photographing Interiors
Whether you own a property or are starting up in interior photography, there are a couple of guidelines that are essential to consider when you are taking pictures of a property. Having stayed in many Airbnb’s over the past couple of years, I realize how important it is to have great pictures of the property online. Sometimes the pictures really don’t do justice to the place and I would pass up on it, just because it doesn’t capture my attention.
The first and probably most important piece of equipment that you are going to need is a tripod. Interiors often have dim lighting, even if they have big windows. So you are going to need to be able to let as much light as you can to the sensor of your camera or phone, which you can do by setting a long exposure time after propping your camera or phone on a tripod to avoid shake. Another way to do it would be to raise the ISO sensitivity, which can work to a certain extent, but then it negatively influences the quality of the image. You also want to keep the F-stop - the opening of the aperture - as high as possible so that everything from the foreground to the background stays sharp. However, this means that there is less light reaching the sensor, therefore you need a slower shutter speed to compensate for that. Taking all this into consideration, investing in a good tripod is essential so that you can set a longer shutter speed without having to compromise on image quality. You don’t have to break the bank purchasing one of these, there are plenty of reasonably priced options out there, but stability is an important point to consider, so make sure that the tripod you decide on can sustain the weight of your camera.
Try to use natural light as much as you can since that will create a uniform look and color temperature throughout your images. In terms of composition, based on what you are going to use the images for, you want to have a variety of composition styles to show off the different aspects of the property. The most important compositions should be taken with a wide angle lens while keeping the camera horizontal to show as much of each room as possible. You can play around with the positioning of your camera and take both head-on and angled shots of the rooms so viewers can have a sense of the organization of each room. Taking more closely cropped images can be useful to present more unique elements and appliances that you can also include in the wide angle shots. You can vary between vertical and horizontal shots as you see fit. I usually use vertical framing when there isn’t enough space or the composition would draw attention away from the focus of the picture - such as doorways, shelves etc.
If you are more tech-savvy and want to make your pictures look truly professional, you can experiment with bracketing your images in spaces where there is a big contrast between different parts of the room. This would usually be in a room with windows to the garden, for example. If there is a lot of light outside, the room will either be really dark to compensate for the light coming from the outside, or the view will be completely burnt out to be able to capture the darker elements of the room. To avoid this, what you can do is take a series of images, changing the setting slightly from one shot to the other and merging the resulting images in your photo editing software. To execute these steps successfully, once again, it is essential that you have a tripod so that the images capture the same exact scene. I usually focus my camera and then set the focus to manual to avoid the camera trying to refocus on each shot, potentially slightly changing the resulting image. So, for example, for your base shot, you can choose to focus on the outside scenery and set a f-stop of 11, going back two to three stops with each shot, for example F11-f8-f5.6 and so on. You will end up with a series of images, some of which appear very dark and others very bright. Your photo editing software will combine these images and give you a lovely, balanced result that you can further edit to your taste.
I would advise placing the tripod at around waist level - a bit higher if you are a short person like me - so that the lines in your images are not skewed. You can adjust lines in post-production as well, but it’s the best to get everything as close to perfect in-camera as possible. Also make sure that your camera is not tilting up or down, but is pointed head on. An exception can be made when you want to show off a feature that couldn’t fit in a straight on composition, such as a ceiling fan.
If you are going to include pictures of the exteriors as well, make sure to get as far away from the property as well, so you can give an overall sense of the place. Here again you can play around with straight on and angled compositions to give a sense of how the space is organized.
I hope these tips can help you take better pictures of your property next time. If you have any examples that you would like to share or questions about any of the points mentioned in the article, feel free to share in the comments or reach out directly!
