Failing to prepare is preparing to fail — or at least take a very average set of marketing photos.
Here’s a few things you can do to make your property easy on the lens. Prepare properly and pay attention to these before any photo shoot if you want to give yourself the very best chance of taking blinding shots that knock the socks off your buyers (and really impress your vendors too).
1. Cars
A driveway full of cars — yes, even if they are Mercs and BMWs — will add nothing of value to your photos and should be removed. If you can’t remove it or haven’t been trusted with the keys then Photoshop will do the job just as well. Our team are like modern day Michelangelos with the digital paint brush.
2. Doors
Throw them open, internal doors that is. The front door can stay closed. Not only does it beef up the amount of light in the room it also shows the “flow” of the house. Houses have flow, okay. If the room is more broom cupboard than master suite shoot the shot through the open doorway. Alternatively if there is to be no door in the shot you can close it, stand it front of it and shoot the rest of the room from that angle.
3. Objects & clutter
One person’s tidy is another person’s bomb site. So, while of course the vendor may have tidied up on account of the photo shoot, it just might not be clutter-free enough. Rather than ask the vendor to roll up their sleeves and get to work (and risk red faces all round) turn to Photoshop. It’ll wipe out the objects, the nik-naks and the clutter in a flash.
4. Curtains and blinds
Open of course. Natural light is everybody’s friend, especially houses.
5. Televisions
Off, naturally. Jeremy Kyle is not going to improve your photos nor help you sell a thing, especially a house. All distractions should be kept to a minimum in your photos – you only want the buyers seeing the good stuff.
6. Wheelie bins
Necessary to the running of a house, not necessary to the selling of a house. Remove all wheelie bins out of shot before taking the photo or (yes you’ve guessed it) Photoshop them out later if necessary.
7. Pets
Even if they are the cutest, fluffiest little bundles of ears and paws – insist they are put outside. Make sure all evidence of them is removed too – like cushions riddled with their hair (aren’t pets just adorable). There’s always photoshop if Coco just won’t comply.
8. Garden rubbish
No one expects you to start clearing the garden and putting out the rubbish before taking your photos – that’d be a bit much. So all that’s left to say here is thank goodness for photoshop. This is an extreme example to showcase what we can do, although be advised that this could be argued to be misleading by some, if you want to use shots like this – it’s your call.
9. Skips, scaffolding and other immovable objects
Scaffolding is an eye-sore and may seriously harm your marketing shots but it’s not all bad news because even scaffolding is no match for the power of the software.
Need some help removing stuff from your shots?
If you don’t have the time or the skills to remove objects and do all the post-production stuff you know you should be doing, fear not, we specialise in just that. Thousands of images are sent to us each month for our team to work their magic on.
We’d love you to check out our Image Enhancement service for FREE so here’s a promocode for you, enter BLOG12 when creating an account 🙂
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Alex Stretton
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[…] cars from shots is just one of the 9 ways to prepare for a property shoot but it’s number 1 on the list. Keeping your external images free of cars will provide a […]