One photograph of a green tile kitchen, edited 2 ways. The fastest place to see the gap is on a color you already know.
Most remodelers can tell their photos are not doing the work justice, without being able to say why. It just feels like the room was better in person than it looks on the screen. There is no vocabulary for the gap, so the conversation with the photographer never happens, and the next shoot comes back exactly the same way.
A real estate photographer is paid to make a space look big, bright and easy to walk through, because space is what sells a listing. It is a 2 hour shoot, usually $150 to $500, and he is genuinely good at that job. Your photos have a different job. They have to make somebody believe you are the one who built the room. Both jobs go by the same title.
Reality: A designer we work with looked at photos of her own project and said, that’s not the wall color. Nothing had been repainted.
Your photographer is not a remodeler. He does not know which 4 things in that room cost you sleep, money, or a week of schedule. One remodeler asked his photographer for close-ups and got a close-up of the ping pong table on the deck. He got exactly what he asked for.
Reality: The photographer gets paid either way. You are the one who has to sell with the photos.
Most remodelers clean before a shoot. Some hire cleaners. Staging is the step after that, and it is almost always the homeowner or the designer who owns it rather than the photographer, which is the expensive surprise. A clean room photographs empty. A staged room photographs like somebody lives a good life in it.
Reality: We tried to edit a beautiful photo until it looked believably bad and could not do it, until we removed the staging.
The shoot gets treated as an expense at the end of a job instead of the thing that makes the job sell the next one.
Real estate and architectural photographers do opposite jobs and go by the same title. Most remodelers hire the first one and expect the second.
Clean is not staged. A spotless empty room photographs like a vacancy, and staging is almost never the photographer’s job.
Over-editing now reads as cheaper, not more premium. An authentic photo beats a perfect one, and the watermarks are the least of it.
He is not a remodeler. If nobody names the 4 features that mattered on this job, they do not get photographed.
The whole space, so everything else has a place to sit. Without it the other photos are floating.
What the room feels like. This is the one that makes a homeowner want it, and the one most often missing.
How the space is actually used. The appliance garage, the pullout, the panel front nobody can spot.
The close-up that proves care. A head-on shot of one joint does more than another wide shot of the room.
Shot from the same spot, on day 1, before demo starts. This is the only one you cannot go back and get.
Same camera position, both times. That is what makes the pair readable.
Note: This session teaches you the method and gives you the tools. We are not running your photo shoot for you, and we are not editing your photos. If you want our team to handle the marketing these photos feed, that is a separate conversation.
I shoot the project photography and video for our clients, which has put me on a plane to dozens of remodeling companies around the country to capture their finished work.
The pattern I see is that the work is almost always better than the photographs of it. It’s rarely the photographer’s fault. Nobody told them which 4 things on that job actually mattered, and nobody staged the room before they showed up. Both of those get decided before the camera comes out.
I built the photography guide our clients work from, and this session is the short version of it. Same 5 mistakes, on almost every shoot I’ve been on.
– Aaron
“It helps me sell more, makes my sales process easier, and helps me get rid of the tire kickers.”
Eli Vaknin
