The Remodeler’s Complete Guide to Project Photography

(00:00) As a remodeler or a custom home builder, photos are the [music] lifeblood of almost all of your marketing assets. And as a marketing company for many of you, we’ve realized that if we can help you get better photos, [music] your marketing not only becomes more beautiful, but becomes much more effective and much more cost effective as well.
(00:17) So, we’ve created this video [music] to be a full guide answering all the client questions that we’ve received over the years about photography, hiring a photographer, what makes the best photos, etc. and we’ll be sharing all the tips we found that will help you avoid the most common mistakes that we see time and time again.
(00:34) By the end of this video, you’ll be equipped with all the information you [music] need to capturing the best photography of your work possible. All right, so here are the chapters for the video. This is everything that we’re going to be going over. If your client success manager sent you this video to solve a specific problem, feel free to jump around to that chapter marker and get the information you need.
(00:50) For those of you joining me for the full video, here’s what we’ll be going through. We’ll start with what great photos actually look like, the five types of shots. Then figure out how to assess your current photographer. Is that photographer the right fit for you? If not, then we can go to how to find a photographer, and then once you have a list of photographers, how to choose what photographer is best for your business.
(01:07) Then we’ll move into how much you should invest in photography, how to communicate and effectively plan with your photographer so you can make sure they capture what actually matters most, and how to stage the space yourself if your photographer is not doing it for you. And after that, we will have the rapid fire FAQ section where we’re just answering the most common questions that we see.
(01:26) All right, let’s start off with the foundation because you can’t judge a photographer or even direct one until you have a good understanding of what good actually even looks like. So, let’s go ahead and define that for you today. Here are the five types of photos that we found every single project is going to need. Starting off with the two most basic shots [music] that just about everybody gets. First, we’re talking about the establishing shot.
(01:45) This is a wide shot that shows the whole space that you’ll be looking at for the rest of the photography. It should show almost the entire space, but not be so much of a wide angle that you get weird distortion and it starts to look more like a real estate photo. Here’s a few bad examples with bathrooms.
(02:03) Bathrooms are especially tricky to get wide angle photos of because they’re tighter. And so often what you’ll see is we have these curved edges on the sides of these photos as opposed to straight lines. This comes from a photographer trying to get the whole space in a single photo. Whereas, if you look at more designoriented bathroom photos like this one, it will intentionally not show the whole space so they can shoot at a tighter focal length and preserve the beauty of the space.
(02:27) The function of these photos is of course to show the whole space, but also to answer the more specific question of where am I? As we go through the rest of the photos, we’ll be showing a lot more detail shots and things like that that if you don’t have the context for it, it can be kind of confusing and you’ll probably miss the full meaning of the photo.
(02:44) Now, one thing to note is this also includes exterior shots of the home, thinking about the story of the project. In this specific example, our client VA did this massive addition on a home, but it was over the edge of a cliff. And so if he had just gotten photography of the interior, you’re missing a large part of the reason why they had to hire him directly because he was one of the only people who would build such a way over that massive cliff.
(03:08) So make sure when you’re thinking about these establishing photos, what is the whole story? What actually does that establishing shot include? Does it need to include exteriors of the house? Does it need to include the neighborhood that you built the work in? Even though establishing shots are probably the most common type of photos, I think those are the types of shots that most people would miss from this category. The second type of photo we’re going to call the design [music] shot.
(03:27) While the first answered the question of where am I, this answers the question of what does the space feel like. These design shots are about emotion, not the function of the space. It’s not about how the space works. It’s about how the space feels to stand in it. The light, the mood, the styling, the way a corner is composed.
(03:44) These are the kind of shots that make people stop scrolling and actually want the space before they can even tell you why. And it’s also the type of shot that is most dependent on the quality of your staging and lighting, which is exactly why we’re going to spend a whole section on staging later on in the video. Now, like I said, these first two categories are the most common shots.
(04:02) And if you’re hiring a photographer who’s not really experienced working with remodelers, then these are probably what you’re going to get. And you might be thinking, of course, we have wide shots and we have close-up shots. What else could we need? Well, there’s a lot of functionality that you don’t realize and the photographer doesn’t realize until you go through and actually explain it.
(04:19) So, let’s go over those next three types now. So, the third type we’re calling the feature shot and answers the question of [music] how do I use it? These specifically highlight key features of your project and the uses of them as well, especially things that aren’t going to be immediately available unless you explain them to a photographer.
(04:40) For example, if you have a hidden dishwasher that pulls out or a hidden cutting board that comes out, a highlight of the specific way that you put in the double ovens or a drop zone that you added into the mudroom. These photos highlight the key things that were important to your clients and also can function for you as upsells later on. What we do with these a lot of times is on websites, we’ll have a key feature section.
(04:58) And in these, we need to have close-ups of all the things that are important. So that way, when a future homeowner is coming and looking at the page, they can see it directly. And often we’ll think to themselves, you know, I never thought about having a dishwasher built in that way, but now that I see it, I would like to explore what it would look like in my kitchen. So these shots aren’t just pretty like the design shots.
(05:18) They’re actually doing a function and having a sales role for you. Now, on to shot number four, the craftsmanship or the detail [music] shot. This answers the question of how much do they really care? So many remallers say that their quality of work and their attention to detail is better than the rest. But what they don’t ever think about is making sure that they have photography actually proving that that’s true.
(05:37) These are the extreme close-ups that show the thoughtful intention in every single detail. The joinery, the grout lines, the hardware, the tile transitions, the problem you solved that nobody else would even notice. So, a note to make here about these detail shots is that you might be thinking of them as similar close-ups to the design shots, but there’s kind of just a key difference here just to spell this out for you. For example, we have this close-up of a plant here as one of the design shots.
(06:00) This is the kind of shot that you would get from an interior design photographer who is naturally inclined just to highlight the beauty of the space. But one of the things to make note of is that they probably are not making a distinction between I’m getting a closeup of a plant which you didn’t build and you didn’t design and I’m getting a closeup of the corner of this island here.
(06:21) The way that this joinery is coming together in their head. They’re just thinking I’m getting detail shots to kind of fill out the full picture. One of the things that you might know as a builder is that inset cabinets are much more difficult to build than your traditional cabinets.
(06:40) However, one of the things you have to realize is that a photographer does not know that. They don’t think about things in that way. They’re thinking about the beauty of the space. They’re not thinking about the practicalities of how maybe you’re able to do it and another builder doesn’t. So, this is something to make sure that you’re educating your photographer on.
(06:51) Like in this photo here, we have close-ups of how evenly these lines are spaced on the cabinet doors. Or, for example, this close-up here of event. No photographer, I don’t think any photographer without prompting would get this photo because event is not super aesthetically pleasing. It’s not something that people highlight. It’s not one of the reasons they’re buying the space.
(07:16) But if you are showing off your attention to work, your quality of detail, this is exactly the kind of photo that you need. So something to take note of, there’s a reason why this is the most commonly missed photo that we get from people. It’s because different photographers you hire will get different sets of photos, but nobody really is specializing in thinking about how can I show off the craftsmanship of this space.
(07:40) So, something to think about with these photos, especially if you are a builder who differentiates themselves based on the quality of your craftsmanship, this might give you actually a chance to prove uh what makes you so different. The last type of photo is the matching before and [music] after shot. And the main reason people miss this is simply because they’re not getting enough before shots or not getting the right before shot to match an after shot.
(08:03) So before we talk about getting a professional after that matches it, the first thing you got to just take note of is when you’re going and doing your final walkthrough of the project before people start coming in and making any changes, you want to go through and take pictures of everything. You want to have wide angles of all the rooms and then any close-ups that you’re going to change later on.
(08:20) If you know you’re going to be taking out a window and replacing it with a different one, go ahead and go through and take pictures of that. You’re not going to regret having too many of these photos. I wouldn’t worry about these being professional in the sense of making sure that they’re extremely well shot. I would worry more about having the right coverage, making sure that you’re shooting everything in the space.
(08:36) The best time to do this is on the very first day of demo before anything is destroyed. Then you have the actual design renderings of the space so you know which parts you’re going to want to highlight further on. This is especially important when you’re doing things like taking out walls because the angle that you’re taking the photo and the before might be different than if you’re actually visualizing what the space looks like without the wall. So, here we have a good example of where our client originally got a photo of the after that
(08:59) looks like this, but it doesn’t really align very well with the before photo. As you can see, flipping back and forth between them, it’s a little hard to line these two images up and understand fully what changed. So then afterwards they came in and they shot this photo which gives it much better.
(09:17) It’s closer to the same angle as this one. It shows a little bit of that stair rail and giving you some context. And overall it’s a better photo to match. Now I would say for this one I think it could be even closer.
(09:36) Like for example, we have this opening here on the right that I’m assuming they added in, but we don’t see that in this photo. Again, I’m assuming that’s what got added in, but I don’t know that. and the camera’s pushed a little bit farther back and we don’t see as deep into the space as we do in this photo. And so even though this is still a good after photo, that is kind of something I would critique or change about this if they were able to go back and shoot it again. It’s still functional. It’s just here’s what to do better the next time.
(09:58) So best case scenario here is you have a before photo, a rendering, and an after photo that all match. These can help make it very clear to homeowners after the fact how did the space actually change? and start to imagine like, “Oh, this space looks so different. I don’t think I would have imagined this in my own space.
(10:16) ” It starts to open them up to new possibilities in their own home. So, take a second, actually go through your photo galleries of your projects and see, are you hitting all of these? Are you hitting most of them? Where do you have gaps? At the very least, this will give you some definitions and wordings to use with your photographer to start immediately improving your photos.
(10:33) So, now that we know what a successful shoot looks like, let’s actually look at how to start improving your photos. And the first step to that is assessing your current photos and your current photographer. [music] All right, so assessing your photos. A lot of times the fixes can be as easy as having a conversation with your photographer and understanding what you need and being able to to tell them that. Sometimes though, you’ll have a photographer that is not a good fit.
(11:01) And so we’re going to go over what both of those look like in this category here. So, here’s a quick checklist of questions that you can ask yourself when going through your photos from your photographer. One, do the photos look natural or heavily edited? Oftent times, especially if you’re working with somebody who’s primarily in real estate photography, you’ll end up with photos that look unnatural.
(11:21) And you may not have the words for it, but you can recognize it when you see it. And here’s a bunch of examples of that now. And you might actually think these photos look fine until you see what we do here, where this photo here, we actually edited. It actually looked like this originally.
(11:39) And when you start to actually look at the differences between these two, we’ve seen this before on some of our photo shoots where you’ll hand it to somebody and they’ll do one of these heavy edits like maybe this wall color is actually kind of an off yellow, like a beige or something, but when they come in, they brighten everything so much that when we look at the edited version now, it’s just plain white.
(11:57) We’ve literally had a designer come back and say, “Hey, I looked at these photos and they look nice, but that is not the wall color for this space. It doesn’t work. it doesn’t fit the feeling that the client wanted. And then we had to go back and look and be like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I see what you’re saying.” Like literally in the edit, they changed the wall color. So, thinking through stuff like that, as well as like if you’re looking at the emphasis of the photos here in this one, the outside is so properly exposed, it’s almost like the area that is like the brightest and has the most contrast. Your eye is naturally drawn to that. Whereas in this toned down one, the
(12:26) outside is a little bit overexposed, a little bit desaturated, and in doing so, it draws more attention to the space. Another thing to look out for is overall just really blown out and overly saturated photos like these ones I showed here at the beginning.
(12:44) These you have, it’s almost hard to really look at it because they’ve increased the contrast so much and the saturation so much it doesn’t look realistic. And while it is eye-catching because of how distinct it is, it doesn’t feel like a space you’d actually like to be in. It doesn’t feel pleasant.
(13:04) Here in this house photo, clearly we have a fake sky, which they will do a lot of times in exterior shots. Sometimes you can do it well, but in the bad ones, you’ll be able to really tell that’s what’s going on here. Like here’s a photo that clearly is supposed to be nighttime, but it’s still lit like it’s the daytime. And one of the things I want to clear up here is it’s not that you’re actually looking for sometimes we’ve heard people say they want raw photos or they want them to look natural. It doesn’t mean that you’re actually getting an unedited photo. It’s that they are still highly
(13:29) edited, but they’re edited in a way that makes them look more natural. It’s actually a more difficult look to pull off. It’s more pleasing to the eye and it looks more like what the space would look like if you actually walked in there.
(13:46) And you can see in these two examples, we have a higher contrast version on this side with more saturated colors that pops, but the right one feels more like what the space would actually feel like if you walked in there. I think one of the most common signs of the overedited photo is that the windows are all perfectly exposed. Like here’s an example of one that’s overexposed, where the windows are brighter than everything.
(14:03) And if you were just taking a picture of the outside, it’d be too bright to take that photo. And here’s kind of the look that a lot of real estate photographers will take where the outside photos are so perfectly exposed it looks unnatural. It’s almost like it’s the uncanny valley of photos. Like it looks too perfect to be real.
(14:23) So hopefully that gives you some idea of the differences you might find between an overedited photo and ones that are more naturally edited. Question number two, do they shoot a good mix of all the photos that we talked about in section one? or as you go through your photos, are you seeing they’re mostly wide room shots like here? This is an example of a portfolio photos that are all wide shots.
(14:41) We really have very minimal detail shots. Whereas, if you can contrast that with this portfolio here, we have kind of some wide shots that show you the space. We have those close-up details of the sink over here, of the cookbook over here. Each of these photos tells a different thing to the audience.
(15:01) And as you get more photos, you get closer and closer to the experience of somebody being able to walk through the space, find something that they like, and then zoom in on it. Basically, they come in, they go, they look a little bit closer to it. And when you’re just getting those wide angle photos, you’re missing out on that.
(15:16) So, kind of like I said at the end of the first section, go through and actually assess, do I have each of the five photo types in my photo galleries? Is this something that my photographer is naturally getting? Next, when you look at the shots of your specific features in the kitchen, do they look natural and beautiful and you can imagine them in the space or do they look like they’re taken from odd angles and they do show the point, but there’s not much thought to the composition or the beauty of the photo.
(15:40) I’m hoping that as I’m showing these on screen, you’re seeing like, yeah, I have some photos like that or I’ve had some and I haven’t thought much of them, but now that I’m seeing those more designoriented shots that you showed earlier in the video, I can see the difference. If we go back to these design shots from earlier, you have very intentional framing.
(16:01) All the lines in this one, for example, are very flat and vertical, you can tell there’s a lot of intentionality that went into every single one of these shots, getting all of the angles exactly right. Whereas when we look back at these photos again, you have odd heights like somebody’s like seven foot tall in this room just looking down on everything or this weird angle where you’re looking directly into the sink.
(16:24) Like here’s two examples of different ways that a person could shoot a sink. Here’s the bad example and the good one. And without getting into all of the technical information of like exactly everything they’re doing, I’m hoping I can give you enough examples that you can start to see, oh yeah, actually my photos do look more like the first type than the second.
(16:43) So, if you’re getting these types of photos consistently, it could very well be the sign of an immature photographer who knows how to set step back in the room, set up a tripod, and take a wide shot, but isn’t really sure how to compose a shot of something specifically. And then lastly, are they open to direction? When you tell them, hey, I want to tone these down.
(17:01) Maybe you can show them an example of what you’re looking for, and they never can quite nail it. That might be a sign that that just is their style. I I’ve heard some people say that they think like, well, they could just edit a different style. Um, but one of the things that’s important to know, like I said a little bit earlier, is that these natural photos are not an easier look to pull off. It’s not that they’re doing less editing.
(17:25) It is very much that somebody who is doing real estate photography on the daily, the level of expertise required for that is much lower than the level of expertise that you’re asking for when you’re showing them these awardwinning architectural design photography shots. So, just something to keep in mind. It’s not as simple as, well, you know, they just need to turn the the brightness down and they need to turn the desaturation.
(17:51) There’s a lot more going on here that if they don’t have the eye for it, they don’t have the desire to shoot it, you can keep telling them, but it may take them longer to get to that point of expertise than you’re really wanting to spend. Just something to keep in mind. So, if going through all these questions and you feel like your photographer nailed it, then great.
(18:09) You can probably skip ahead to communicating with your photographer and getting the most out of them. But if you’re curious about how could you get a better result with a different photographer, in this next section, we’re going to be doing more education on what are the different types of photographers out there, how do you find them, and how can you make sure you’re choosing the right one for your business? Even if you’ve already done the research and you’re telling me, “I’ve already looked and I’ve seen and there’s no good people in my area.” Hopefully, this section will help you to see, well, there’s probably a few places
(18:34) you haven’t checked or just some things you haven’t been willing to consider. In smaller markets, it can be harder to find a photographer. This is a chart that I made with Claude. I had it go through and do a lot of research on the density of photographers, actually finding verified photographers in these cities.
(19:01) Now, while this isn’t exact, this is a good representation of there are definitely heat spots where there are a ton of photographers to choose from. And there are definitely areas where you can go through, find where you live, and be like, “Yeah, not a lot to choose from.” Now, if you’re in these areas where you see like a single dot, don’t freak out because this is not an exhaustive list by any means.
(19:19) This is purely just a sample of all the different photographers just to kind of show you here’s a representative sample of about how many you can expect in your area. If you land in one of those areas that have an abundance of photographers, you can probably skip to the next section where we’re talking about how to narrow that list down and how to pick a good photographer.
(19:37) If you’re in one of these areas that has less than an abundance of photographers, then in this section we’ll be covering how can you actually find the photographer. There’s probably a few methods that you aren’t thinking of right now. The first thing obviously, yes, you can Google residential photographer, interior design photographer, architectural photographer, or even just photographer.
(19:55) If nothing really comes up there in your area, it’s very possible that your photographer is not investing in SEO and is not found on search. So, a couple other avenues you can look for them is one, instead of searching for the photographers, search for architects in your area. Search for interior designers in your area.
(20:12) Very very often these people will link to the photographers that captured their work either on their website or in their social media. That can often lead you back to people who are actively working in their area but just not listed on Google. If you found architects, similar remodelers, builders, or designers that have photos but it’s not listed who it is, then at that point then you can go and actually call these people and see if they can give you a reference. Additionally, you could look up the ASMP listings in your
(20:38) area to find people that are actually listed with the local photography groups. Here are two different sites I found by different groups. Um, find aphotographer.com and asmpp.orgfind aphotographer. These are specifically designed for photographers coming in saying, “Hey, I want work.” And now the website is able to match a somebody looking for work with somebody that is willing to do it.
(21:01) I mean, you can see from this example, some people have just their first name, last name, and information to contact them. Some people don’t have a website on here. So, definitely do your verification from here. But, at the very least, this will give you some leads to follow up on if you have absolutely nothing.
(21:21) And then if you’ve gone through all of this stuff, you’re in one of those sparse areas and you really don’t have anybody in the right category in your area. Then at that point, as a last case scenario, instead of hiring maybe your cousin who likes photography or just somebody in your uh company who’s kind of good with a camera, I would then go out and honestly over that person, I would hire just a standard photographer, maybe a portrait photographer, a wedding photographer with the caveat of you’re going to have to invest a little bit more.
(21:45) not necessarily monetarily, but more of your time and energy into making sure you’re getting the right photos. But that’s what the rest of the video is for. So, now we’re going to transition to picking that correct photographer of the options that you have. And then after that, we’re going into how to get the most from that photographer.
(22:01) What are the things that you can train them on? How can you make sure you’re getting the right assets for your project? If you’ve gone through all of these options and you still don’t have anybody, I would suggest looking farther or opening yourself up to paying more. Oftentimes when we’ve talked to people, it’s not truly that there are no photographers.
(22:18) It’s that there are photographers that are a little bit farther than they would like or there are photographers that are a little bit more expensive than they would like. In those cases, I would really suggest that you invest in the foundational photography that you need for the rest of your marketing assets. Bite the bullet, take that relationship, and I don’t think you’ll regret it.
(22:37) [music] So, if you’re specifically looking for a photographer to shoot interior spaces, what you’ll most likely find is a real estate photographer or an architectural design or maybe even an interior design photographer. So, for the sake of this video, I’m going to kind of combine an architectural photographer and an interior design photographer.
(22:56) While they do have differences, they’re more minor compared to those differences between the two of them and a real estate photographer. All right, so let’s talk through the pros and cons. the main differences between those types of photographers. So, a real estate photographer obviously serves realtors.
(23:14) Their whole job is to make the space look big, bright, and easy to walk through. They produce fast, high volume work. They’re usually doing about a 2hour shoot, and they’re often about $150 to $500 per shoot. Their goal is to maximize the space because space sells, and their style is most likely going to be more light and bright and kind of that heavily edited look that we talked about earlier.
(23:39) problems that you’re going to run into if you use them is that you’re going to get a lot of these wide shots. And I would be less confident in their ability to artfully capture those close-up features or the design shots that you’re looking for. So, looking through these photos, you see a lot of those kind of like key details I was telling you to look out for earlier. Like we have like here again, we have another example of those windows that are perfectly exposed.
(23:59) It’s a little bit unnatural to your experience when you’re standing in the space. They’re all wide angles. There’s very little set dressing or intentionality to the the beauty of the space. And they have that high contrast overedited look we talked about.
(24:16) Now, one of the things I’ll make note of that we’re going to come back to later, but I just want to make note of here so that you understand the importance is a lot of this what you’re seeing the difference here, like why these photos don’t look good actually isn’t those things. It’s not the overedited, it’s not the uh wide angle photos. Um, but a lot of it is the staging of the photos. Like you have all these empty rooms. I actually have some examples here.
(24:38) You have actual intentionality to staging and it makes a very big difference. And I really do think the more that I go through this, it is the most important part of your photography. May maybe second most, but it is for sure one of the top two most important parts of your photography. And oftentimes it’s something that’s entirely in your control.
(24:57) So definitely make sure you check out that section on staging if that’s something that you have limited confidence in. So that’s the real estate photographer. On the other hand, we have the interior design or the architectural photographer. And these photographers obviously serve designers and architects.
(25:13) Their kind of shoots are what gets into publications like Architectural Digest or Bare Homes and Gardens. They have fewer shoots and each of them take far longer to do the shoot. often booking for a full day rate from 1,000 to upward of $3,000. Some of them will shoot at an hourly rate. It just depends on the person you’re talking to.
(25:31) Now, unlike real estate photographers, their goal is to capture the beauty of the space. They aren’t looking to sell the space. They’re not focused on ROI. They’re purely focused on the aesthetics of the photo, making everything look as beautiful as possible. Some people describe their style as more dark and moody, but to my eye, I think these look much more natural, and sometimes that is darker, but I don’t think that’s a bad look.
(25:56) It’s what aligns you more with an architectural digest as opposed to a Zillow listing. Now, problems that you’re going to run into with them is that they’re still shooting for a different audience typically. So, they’re not thinking about the builder mindset. So, even people we know, even our clients who have gotten these kinds of photographers still have the problem of they’ll miss important details without the structure.
(26:12) Which is why later on we’re going to be going over exactly how to communicate with them and get the most out of them. So, even amongst interior design or architectural photographers, if you have a selection where you’re looking at a few different ones of those and you’re trying to make that distinction, a couple of questions that you should be thinking about, a couple things to ask.
(26:30) Who takes care of the styling? Some of them will have interior designers that they work with, but in most cases that will be on you to take care of the staging of the photos. Where are the majority of their photos? Is this a photographer that does everything, or is it one that really specializes in residential markets? Here’s a good example of a photographer who says they’re residential, but if we look at their portfolio, they do a lot of commercial work.
(26:58) And I honestly think that bleeds over into their residential work to make it look even then a little bit commercial. And I’ve also seen examples of photographers who are really real estate photographers who claim to be architectural or interior design photographers, but you can still see that real estate style bleeding into what they claim to be this different style of photography.
(27:17) Stuff like this especially that looks incredibly overpolished honestly is an exterior shot that somehow looks like it’s an interior shot. Stuff like this is what I mean by commercial stuff that bleeds uh into the residential. Technically, yes, this is a residence, but it’s so clean. And this isn’t real staging. That’s definitely virtually staged.
(27:42) To me, especially as we are getting into an era of more AI upscaled and AI edited photos. To me, I think these photos are going to become less and less valuable to you because these have that look. We’re at the point now where even if this isn’t AI, people are going to look at these photos and be like, “Well, that’s just AI.
(28:00) ” it’s going to lose credibility very quickly, which is why I think you need to lean more into the very naturalistic looking photos. I can understand why people do it. It can be a large hassle to stage a space, especially if you don’t have an expertise in that. Maybe you don’t have a designer, like you outsource your designs to another company and you don’t have somebody constantly with you who understands interior design.
(28:19) I can see why you would do it, but I think the cons outweigh the benefits of it, which again is why we’re going through a whole section at the end of this video on staging. All right, so moving into how much to invest in your photographer. [music] You just saw the gap. There was a clear gap between what you might be typically expecting from a real estate photographer and these higherend photographers.
(28:47) And you might have immediately thought to yourself, well, I bet I could get a real estate photographer to do a good job. And you might. Um, but in a lot of cases, I think I want to help talk you out of that. Not because I have some sort of inside deal with these photographers. Not because it’s more virtuous to spend more money on your photos, but because I think the half measure is the one that actually wastes more money.
(29:04) My first point here is thinking about the very beginning of this video where I talked about your photos are the foundation for the rest of your marketing assets. We’ve seen for ourselves the insane difference in quality that can happen as a result of just better photos.
(29:22) I mean, we do a lot of websites for people and we can make very, very beautiful websites, but if you throw bad photos on there, there’s really not much we can do. Here’s screen recordings. I went through and took the same website and just replace the photos. And you can see the just the difference in value that you’re presenting, the difference in quality of remodeler that you’re presenting yourself as.
(29:40) Even if you have everything else right, you have the right branding, you have the right website, you have the right copy, it doesn’t matter if your photos do not align with that. The same is true for your ads, your social media, direct mail that you take care of or yard signs, anything like that.
(29:59) And on top of that, you have to realize that when you’re going with a cheaper photographer or somebody that has less proven work, you are taking a risk that you might lose quality photos of your best work. There is probably a lot more that goes into photography than immediately is apparent to you. For example, here’s a quick list of the things that I do with photography that you don’t need to know, but it’s important for you to know that you don’t know them. Deciding between HDR shoot or a flamant shoot.
(30:21) Knowing how to edit an HDR shoot versus a flamant shoot. balancing the color of the photos and masking out and distracting objects without removing important details. Cropping the photo and aligning your verticals and horizontals to make sure that everything in the photo is perfectly plum and perfectly level.
(30:38) As well as all that, a stylistic coloring of the photo to match the feeling of the space. Photographers who are very good at photography make it look natural. And so then it can seem as if it’s very easy to do and anybody with an expensive camera can get it done. It’s just not the case. That’s why I would invest in a professional photographer who knows what they’re doing.
(30:58) So, I would just encourage you to go all the way on this and treat it like an investment that will last you for multiple years. It’s turning a project that you did one time and turning into a project that you can now used as a sales asset for the next three, four years to come. And if that requires that you’re shooting less of your projects, oftentimes what we’ve seen from our perspective is that it’d be better to capture three of your projects in a very high quality format and actually have those be good representations of your work as opposed to capturing 10 projects halfhazardly. So now let’s actually make sure you’re getting your money’s worth with your
(31:26) photographer. Let’s talk about planning with your photographer and getting the most out of your photography. I would say most of the frustration that we’ve seen with our clients comes from not always just having the wrong photographer, but having the right photographer and not communicating with them the value that needs to get expressed across through the photos.
(31:46) Many times we’ve been at the point where they have an amazing feature the client loved, but honestly they just didn’t think of it in time to get photos of it and now we can’t show it to people on the site.
(32:00) I’ll tell you, we had one client that does a lot of custom carpentry, and they wanted to get a lot of close-up detail shots of their work to show the level of craftsmanship that they put into their work. And they told their photographer, “Hey, make sure you get a lot of close-ups in this room.” And what they got back was close-ups of some of the set dressing, the cookbooks, the plants, and the ping pong table in the corner.
(32:22) Now, not that these weren’t beautiful photos, but those do not sell their work. that’s not at all what they were trying to express. So, I built a photographer prep sheet here. And the point of this document is both for your photographer to reference, but mainly it’s for you to go through and force yourself to sit down and actually answer these questions and think through what were the important aspects of the project. You’ll see as we go through and answer them all.
(32:45) Unless you’re actually forced to take the time to sit and think for a second about what actually was important to the homeowner, you’re going to miss things. and your photographer is going to miss things, but it’s not the photographer’s fault. It’s the fact that they were missing information. So, honestly, along with staging, this might be one of the most important pieces in this whole video.
(33:03) The people that are going to get the best photos are the people that are going to take the time up front to plan out what photos they need and really give all that information over to their photographer. So, it’s seven questions and we’ll walk through it here. Question number one, what’s the full scope of the project? Sometimes it’s like, “Yes, we did this kitchen, but we also added a little drop zone here in this mud room, or we did this kitchen, and we also updated some vanities in the bathroom.
(33:27) What’s the full scope to make sure that you’re capturing everything in this home?” Number two, who was this built for, and what did they want out of the space? I would give a couple sentences here, like an example being, we had empty nesters looking to host family in the holidays, or it was an aging and place bathroom renovation. There’s a growing family addition.
(33:44) what what was kind of the story here? Then the photographer can take this information with them while they’re shooting and it can change the way they shoot the space. And don’t miss on the first part of this question the the first part where it was who was this built for.
(33:58) Give us some personal information about where they’re at in life, what their goals are, what in their life caused them to do this remodel. Now, oftentimes people don’t take it this last step and you miss a lot of the functionality of how is a homeowner going to view this space and it can change the way a photographer shoots the space.
(34:15) Number three, do you have any before photos, floor plans, renderings that would be helpful to provide to the photographer so they can match those angles? Number four, which two to six elements should get the most attention and why does each one matter to the homeowner? So, this can just be a bulleted list, but sometimes it can be helpful to have to actually manually go through and say, well, we added this double oven and why did why was that important to them? making sure that we’re capturing that double oven or the pullout dishwasher, keeping those things tucked away or maybe it’s expanding the island. What were the key features that were important to the homeowner and how
(34:44) can we feature them in the photography? A couple things to note on this before we move on is here’s actually an example for one of our clients. This is Mcomesy Builders and overall these photos are fantastic. These are really good.
(35:02) They have a lot of detail shots, but if there’s anything that I could critique or change, here’s an example of what we were talking about earlier about having a feature that you don’t have a closeup of. We have here a Wolf range and a pizza oven built for hosting. And we do have these items in the in the photo. You can see them there. Um, but they aren’t highlighted in the same way. It’s not as intuitive what the photo is of.
(35:20) Whereas, if we look over at the mudroom, we have a picture that perfectly shows the whole mudroom. This is how we sell things on the site. This is how other future homeowners are going to see what options to choose from, what features they want to put into their own kitchen.
(35:37) And so, if you don’t go through and plan out what those features are ahead of time, what was so important to them, then you’ll end up in the case scenario where you’re kind of making a photo work on the site, you could have a photo that specifically highlights what you’re looking for.
(35:49) Number five, now this one’s going to make sure that you’re getting those craftsmanship photos that you need. What craftsmanship or detail deserves a close-up? We’re looking for things like specific details you made in the grout lines, the joinery, the hardware, transitions. Think about any small details that you had to specifically account for or change to make the project as perfect as possible.
(36:06) We want to make sure that these small details are not lost, that your team and your project managers are getting credit for these small things that they’re doing. Number six, are there any unusual shots that you would like to help tell a story? Now, this is something to think through. Like, I’ll give you a few examples. Earlier we talked about that VA house that was on the edge of a cliff.
(36:26) Taking an unusual shot with a drone of the house going over the cliff side is not something that’s typically in a scope of work, but was actually crucial for that story. We had another project where somebody did an addition onto a house, but they took all interior photos and then realized after the fact, you actually can’t really tell we did an addition.
(36:44) It just looks like we renovated a living room. Having that exterior shot of the home would have really been able to help them see like, no, here was the original house and here’s what we added on. And as well, if it’s something like a lakehouse, a vacation home where the actual environment around the home is integral to the story, something like a window with a big view was important to them because they have this beautiful view. Making sure you’re capturing photos of that as well to help tell that story.
(37:09) And then number seven, is there anything you do not want to emphasize? A lot of times you’ll be like, “Hey, we did this kitchen over here, but these are pre-existing cabinets. We don’t need to feature those.” Stuff like that. So, as you’re prepping for your shoot, I would say fill out this form, take some time, go over it, and really think through what are the things we have to capture.
(37:25) Creating a shot list for your photographer, making sure there are no gaps when you get those photos back. All right, so moving a little bit closer to the shoot now. Now that we have prepped for the shoot, we have our shot list. Let’s talk a little bit about staging. [music] Staging is one of the most important parts of a beautiful project photo.
(37:45) And often times people will just not take it that last step to make a difference. The best staging is usually [music] natural and almost invisible. You just don’t think about it being staged. You just think about how beautiful the space is. [music] And it’s a lot of times you don’t recognize the staging until you remove it from the photo and you realize that it’s empty.
(38:04) So, if you’re going to be doing the staging yourself, there’s a few things to keep in mind. First off, staging is the storytelling of the project. It’s the fastest way to convey the meaning of a space, the use of a space. For example, a pair of shoes in a mudroom, or wine glasses in the pullout dishwasher, a towel draped over the side of a soaking tub, a book and reading lamp on a nightstand. And none of these things are random.
(38:27) They all convey the usage of the space and help people picture what it would be like if they actually lived there. How would I actually interact with this home? On top of that, they can also just add for some of those very good design, more emotional shots like here in this project that Rainy Blair Weidman did. You did not create the plant.
(38:44) However, the plant adds to the feeling of the space, the natural feeling to it. And when you put that in context of the rest of the gallery, you now see how it can help play into telling the whole picture of the story. There are routes you can go down where you can virtually stage a space, but as time goes on, I think I would recommend that less and less for the same reason I talked about earlier that I think as soon as people start to have any sort of doubt that this photo is not real, you’re going to lose credibility with your audience. Even if
(39:08) the photo of the space is 100% real, but now you’ve put fake furniture in it, sometimes that is enough to make a homer look at the photo, decide that it’s fake, and immediately go on to the next website. If you need to do that full-on staging with furniture and bringing in art and things like that, it’s definitely worth hiring a custom service to come in and do that for you. Now, for the things where you’re doing light staging, that’s kind of what we’re going to be covering in this video.
(39:32) Going through removing clutter from the photo, adding in little decor, plants, bowls of fruit, things like that. That’s all stuff that can entirely be done by your team. Typically, a designer on your team or someone who enjoys it.
(39:48) But regardless, we’re going to be going through a quick crash course on how to do staging in photos. Step one is mostly subtraction at first. You want to take a lot of stuff out of the photo before you ever start adding things back in. It’s funny, [music] you need to remove more than you think you do. Little things like when you first go in, I I remember when I was first doing photos, like things like you would see soap dispensers or trash cans, maybe paper towel rolls, like you’re like, “Well, these would actually be in the space.
(40:11) ” and they would, but if unless they’re actually adding to the aesthetics of the space, typically you can take those out and you’ll never notice. They’re actually more of an eyesore when you leave them in. So, we want to remove those function items. Uh, anything with a logo or label that could be distracting, look like some sort of product placement, you want to get rid of that.
(40:30) Then, you want to take care of cords, remotes, things like that. One last thing to always check is in the reflections of say a window, a mirror, or even like an oven. Sometimes you’ll see things in the reflection of that or outside of the windows. I’ve seen people take photos of kitchens and just outside the window they’ll have like construction material just out of frame. Those can be removed now.
(40:50) But it’s simple enough to just go ahead and get that out of the photo before you shoot. Like in this example here, I’m in Lightroom, the most common editing software for photographers, and you have the option to go through and remove all this junk. But one of the side effects of it is it actually physically changed that these sliding glass doors into something that’s not sliding glass doors.
(41:14) So as you’re going through and doing that, sometimes it will work out fine, but you don’t want to count on that because other times it will go through and actually delete crucial information about your project that you don’t want to put your name on a photo that looks like this here. So AI removal is fantastic and can fix minor details. It’s not something you want to rely on to fix every single thing.
(41:34) An additional note to make here is that it can be hard at first from personal experience removing a homeowner’s personal items from their home. Um, one I I would just you just have to push through it. Here’s a list of lines generated by ChatGBT of things you could say to them. This part can be difficult, but it is definitely still essential.
(41:58) So, when you’re in that space where you have to make that decision of, do we remove this or do we not? Sometimes it can be tempting to be like, no, I’m sure it will be fine. If you have the question, remove it and replace it. Once we’ve removed everything out of the space, now we can begin to start adding things back in that add to the feeling of the space. [music] So, let’s move on to styling the space.
(42:17) So, a few styling principles that do most of the work are one, group in odd numbers. Threes often look like they’re very intentionally placed. pairs and even rows of things can look stiff. Clustering small items in groups of threes typically looks best. There is some science and psychology behind this. People say things like your brain easily cancels them out, like it pairs things off and then cancels them out, whereas it takes more time for it to study groups of threes.
(42:40) Regardless, I think it just looks better. So, just go by that because it just looks better. Number two, varying the height of objects and making triangles. Tall, medium, short next to each other, a stack of books, a vase, a small bowl reads as styled. Whereas, if you have the same height rows, it feels very bland.
(42:59) And again, you don’t have to worry about all the psychology of it, but you can definitely see a difference between a photo like this and a photo like this. Number three, thinking about layering texture on top of each other. So, a throw blanket with a slight deliberate drape or a couple pillows. Texture is what makes the space feel warm instead of empty.
(43:18) A great example of this is always when people drape a towel over the bathtub. And lastly, fluffing and shaping the the pillows and things like that. You can plop the pillows. You know, people do that karate chop method. Straighten the rugs. Make sure that any art or hanging items on the wall are nice and straight. And really just doing those fine details right at the end.
(43:36) I really like little things like these, like the edge of this book on the arm of the chair. Like you can imagine yourself getting up to going and getting another drink or something like that while you’re reading. And this is what the space looks like while you’re doing it. You’ll definitely want to build a staging kit if you don’t already have one.
(43:55) [music] Here’s a small list of items here that you could go ahead and purchase and reuse in different spaces. While you don’t have to invest a lot in these things, I would suggest investing in stuff that is highquality. If you’re buying fake plants, make sure that they are highquality, very realistic fake plants.
(44:13) You don’t want somebody looking at your photo of a $200,000 kitchen remodel and then seeing cheap cookbooks and cutting boards and fake plants in there. Along with like a standard kit that you’d be traveling around with, there’s also importance to getting fresh things each time. A lot of times I’ve seen clients will have a wine bottle, fresh bread, some fruit, and even a fresh bouquet of flowers that they can move around the space as needed.
(44:31) There are often times that when prepping the space, you’ll go through and turn all the lights on, making [music] sure you get all the underc cabinet lighting. Um, that’s something to note with a photographer. If you specifically need to capture under cabinet lighting, as you get into those higherend architectural and interior design photos, if you actually look through them, you’ll notice almost all of them, they rely on natural lighting, or at least what looks like natural lighting, and they turn off those interior lights.
(44:55) It’s funny how natural it looks because you literally don’t notice it at first. But as I go through and look at each of these photos, you can see there is literally not a single interior light unless you’re counting the fireplace that’s turned on. In these photos, they are completely naturally lit or what looks like natural lighting.
(45:12) Oftent times it will be they’ll have lighting off camera um that is shooting to mimic the sun. Sometimes it will be the actual sun. Sometimes they’ll do that. So, if you have a photographer that brings in lights, that’s not a bad thing. Um, it’s more about the the finished product.
(45:30) Now, the reason for this a lot of times is that they don’t want the different color temperatures mixing. So, the light coming in from the windows is pretty blue and often times the light coming from the interior lights are orange and the competing of those two colors can make a photo look unnatural. Here’s a photo that I’ve kind of changed in post to take those blue levels and bring them back up to orange.
(45:48) So you can kind of see that it looks a little bit more flat, a little bit more uniform, but it’s still not the same as actually having all the same color light in the space at the time. So typically the best solution is to keep the lights off and just use natural lighting or what looks like natural lighting to light up the whole space.
(46:06) There are methods that they can get around where they can show the interior lighting and also not affect the color temperatures too much, but it’s a more specific process and a lot of times it requires them to physically shoot the photo differently. Um, not also do they just have to turn them on, but they have to do different exposure settings while they’re shooting.
(46:23) So, definitely definitely definitely if that’s something you’re doing, make sure that you make the photographer well aware of it so they can prep for that when they’re planning their shoot. And I want to show you this last example to show you how impactful lighting actually is. Here’s a post from NS Builders and they do the first of all, they just do these very cool during shoots that they professionally shoot and you have a space that there’s no staging here.
(46:48) There’s no beautiful finished carpentry or anything like that. It is really just composition and lighting that makes these photos look beautiful. So again, I’m just kind of showing you these to show you the impact that lighting can have.
(47:04) And if your photographer is going through and changing lighting or turning stuff off, work with them, but also trust that they know what they’re doing. If you’ve taken all the steps up until this point of finding the right photographer, then you can trust that this is a person who knows what they’re doing with lighting. But past that, it really is on the photographer to do their part, make the space look as beautiful as it does in person in the photos, and then really the only thing for you to worry about is utilization of the photos, which we’ll focus on in another video. But if you followed these steps, you have the right photographer, you’ve had good communication with them,
(47:29) you’ve done the expectation set and created the shot list, you really should be set to get absolutely stunning photos of your work from this point moving forward. All right, let’s tackle some FAQs. Now, there are going to be some repeat information from the rest of the video to here um specifically for people just coming into the FAQs just to get their quick questions answered.
(47:52) So, number one, what if there is no good photographer in my area? So, I addressed this a little bit earlier in the video, and you can go back to finding the right photographer if you want more information on this, but in smaller markets, it can be harder to find a photographer.
(48:10) So, if you happen to fall in one of these areas where you have very few photographers, there are a few set of steps that you can follow that you maybe haven’t thought about. The first thing obviously yes you can Google residential photographer, interior design photographer, architectural photographer or even just photographer. If nothing really comes up there in your area, it’s very possible that your photographer is not investing in SEO and is not found on search.
(48:32) So a couple other avenues you can look for them is one instead of searching for the photographers, search for architects in your area. Search for interior designers in your area. Very very often these people will link to the photographers that captured their work either on their website or in their social media. That can often lead you back to people who are actively working in their area but just not listed on Google.
(48:50) If you found architects, similar remodelers, builders, or designers that have photos but it’s not listed who it is, then at that point then you can go and actually call these people and see if they can give you a reference. Additionally, you could look up the ASMP listings in your area to find people that are actually listed with the local photography groups.
(49:10) Here are two different sites I found by different groups. Find aphotographer.com and asmpp.org/findotographer. These are specifically designed for photographers coming in saying, “Hey, I want work.” And now the website is able to match a somebody looking for work with somebody that is willing to do it.
(49:28) I mean, you can see from this example, some people have just their first name, last name, and information to contact them. Some people don’t have a website on here. So, definitely do your verification from here. But, at the very least, this will give you some leads to follow up on if you have absolutely nothing.
(49:47) The benefit of this is you’re getting somebody that is surely verified and further on in their career, but there are plenty of photographers in your area who are probably not on these lists. Just another place to check. If you are very desperate, you can then go on to wedding photographers and portrait photographers. However, I would take those with extreme caution.
(50:05) I would only use that in the example that you really truly truly cannot find anybody who does the other ones. The things that I would be looking for in that case is making sure I’m getting somebody who can shoot beautiful work. Like as you’re looking through, think about the things that we talked about earlier about the detail shots. They have good composition. They made sure that things are aligned and all the shots are intentional. there’s nice lighting in the photos.
(50:24) If you have somebody that knows how to work a camera and knows how to recognize those kinds of beauty, that’s a good starting point. But what you’ll need to do from there is do the education on. Here’s what’s important to me. Here’s what we need to capture with the project. All the things that they will miss for sure if you don’t highlight uh the importance of them, especially if they’re not used to shooting interiors.
(50:46) If you’ve gone through all of these options and you still don’t have anybody, I would suggest looking farther or opening yourself up to paying more. Oftentimes when we’ve talked to people, it’s not truly that there are no photographers. It’s that there are photographers that are a little bit farther than they would like or there are photographers that are a little bit more expensive than they would like.
(51:04) In those cases, I would really suggest that you invest in the foundational photography that you need for the rest of your marketing assets. bite the bullet. Take that relationship and I don’t think you’ll regret it. Whose job is staging? Mine or the [music] photographers? Yeah. So, oftentimes, uh, especially as you get higher end, a lot of photographers will expect the staging to be done as they come in.
(51:28) They might help with light styling, things like that, making the space looks nice, moving furniture slightly, fluffing pillows, things like that. But mostly, in most cases, this is going to be on you to do that. So, for that, if that’s not something you’re used to, I would point you to the section of the video where we go through a crash course on staging. Number five, do I need to be on site for the shoot and how involved should I be? Yeah.
(51:45) Um, a few of our clients have talked about not really wanting to take the time to be there. Obviously, I’m going to suggest that you are there for the shoot or at the very least you’ve done the prep resources beforehand and you’re sending somebody who knows the project story to be with the photographer.
(52:01) It’s not that you need to babysit the photographer and be looking over their shoulder, but it can be good to have those in-person conversations about the goal of here’s what we need from the photos, here’s what we’re looking to do, and here’s the story of the project. And the point of this document is both for your photographer to reference, but mainly it’s for you to go through and force yourself to sit down and actually answer these questions and think through what were the important aspects of the project. Unless you’re actually forced to take the time to sit and think for a
(52:25) second about what actually was important to the homeowner, you’re going to miss things and your photographer is going to miss things. But it’s not the photographer’s fault. It’s the fact that they were missing information. So honestly, along with staging, this might be one of the most important pieces in this whole video.
(52:43) The people that are going to get the best photos are the people that are going to take the time up front to plan out what photos they need and really give all that information over to their photographer. That kind of stuff can make the photographer shoot differently than they would if they didn’t have that context. It can make them think differently about what kind of photos they need to tell that story.
(53:02) What should photos cost? How do I budget? Yeah, so typically a real estate photographer will do them based on the shoot. Sometimes I’ve also seen based on the square footage of the house, but you’re looking typically around $200 to $500, whereas a higherend architectural or interior design photographer is going to be about 1,000 to 3,000 for a day rate.
(53:19) One of the things to check on with this is making sure that you have the license to use the photos however you want. There are some cases in which you only get a single use. There are some where you can use them forever, but it’s an additional cost. It’s something to confirm with your photographer before you book the shoot. How long does a typical photo shoot take? Yeah.
(53:36) Um, depending on your photographer, it can take anywhere from two hours to a full day shoot. Um, the main differences here is if you’re booking somebody cheaper, it will be a faster shoot. I would still say account for like 2 to three hours for it. Um, but if you’re going through, especially if you’re doing a whole home, that is typically going to be a full day shoot.
(53:55) And the reason for that is twofold. One, they slow down to make sure that they get all the details exactly correct in the space before they shoot the photo. And the other is just purely based on the lighting. If you shoot the same exact space with the same exact photographer, morning, noon, and night, you’ll have three very different photos.
(54:13) And depending on the space, it might very well be that the photo that looks awful during morning time looks amazing at evening just based on where the sun’s at. So I think especially for custom home builders where there is no family immediately trying to move back in or living in the space, definitely go the full day shoot route.
(54:31) What are the most common mistakes I should avoid when hiring a photographer? [music] Yeah, there’s uh a few big ones. So the first one is just half investing in those cheap photographers, the people that you think you’re going to make. save some money by investing in them, but ultimately what happens is they aren’t photos that are useful or you have a use case later on in your marketing that you aren’t able to take advantage of and you pay for that cost later on by having less efficient marketing overall. I would say the second is when hiring a photographer,
(54:58) you’re not going through and checking what their body of work looks like. Are they mostly a residential interior photographer or are they mostly a commercial shooter? Are they mostly a wedding photographer? From what I’ve seen, that will oftentimes really bleed into their interior photography work.
(55:16) And if they have examples of interior photography, I would take a closer look and see, yes, this is residential work, but does it still look commercial, if you understand what I’m saying? Number three, um assuming that the photographer will do staging, set dressing, or really just not prioritizing at all. Uh this is a massive difference to your photos.
(55:36) you really can’t show off the full beauty of the work if you have a bunch of junk all in it or stuff that really doesn’t add to the story. And the last big mistake is just giving your your photographer either no direction or too vague of direction. Asking for close-ups of a space and then what you ultimately end up is getting close-ups of a ping-pong table that you didn’t build and you didn’t sell.
(55:54) It’s not that these photographers are dumb. It’s that most of them do not work with builders and are not used to that mindset of thinking about what are you wanting the photos for? How are you going to utilize them? Do I need a professional photographer? We’ve had people say like, “Hey, I have a guy at my church who’s offered to do them or my son or you know, our cousin is interested in photography and they kind of shoot some photos every now and then.
(56:18) ” I would say yes, you need a professional to do it. There’s probably a lot more that goes into photography than immediately is apparent to you. For example, here’s a quick list of the things that I do with photography that you don’t need to know, but it’s important for you to know that you don’t know them. Deciding between an HDR shoot or a flamant shoot. Knowing how to edit an HDR shoot versus a flamant shoot.
(56:38) Balancing the color of the photos and masking out and distracting objects without removing important details. Cropping the photo and aligning your verticals and horizontals to make sure that everything in the photo is perfectly plum and perfectly level. As well as all that, a stylistic coloring of the photo to match the feeling of the space.
(56:57) photographers who are very good at photography make it look natural and so then it can seem as if it’s very easy to do and anybody with an expensive camera can get it done. It’s just not the case. That’s why I would invest in a professional photographer who knows what they’re doing. If you don’t have the odd option and in your area the best you can do is a lower-end real estate photographer or one of your friends who has a small photography business.
(57:16) No matter who it is, the first thing I would do is going through and checking their portfolio of work. If you’re interested in going those other ways, I would want to make sure no matter who it is, they have a proven gallery of work showing that they can do the type of projects that you’re looking to have them shoot.
(57:32) At the very least, you need to understand that by giving these photographers a chance, you might be losing the chance to capture some of your best work and share that with homeowners for years to come. [music] But do I need professional before and during photos? No. I would say typically not.
(57:49) Now, what you do want to do is make sure when you’re at those early stages of the project, you are taking photography all throughout. Um, especially those before photos, grabbing wide angles that you can later match, going through and thinking about like even if it’s a space where you’re taking a wall out. Um, thinking about like, okay, in the future, this whole room is going to be this room plus this room, so I need to take a photo here.
(58:07) So, that way in the after, you can then match that angle and get a better visual. But no, I don’t think you need those photos to be nearly as professional. And sometimes it’s even worse, I think, when you have very professional looking befores because then people can confuse them with the afters.
(58:26) If you’d like a photographer to come in and take some of the befores, I that’s when I would use those cheaper real estate photographers, maybe somebody on Fiverr, something like that, where you can get somebody just to come in, they have a tripod, they have the nice camera, it’ll be good resolution, and they can just come through and snap those photos. What’s the difference between a [music] real estate and interior design photographer? While real estate photographers obviously work with realtors, they’re much cheaper, they have faster shoots, and they rely on quick, high volume work. Their goal is to maximize the space and make it often look light and bright. The downside of this is that
(58:55) they don’t focus on close-ups of the space, and their photos often look heavily edited. On the contrary, your interior design or architectural photographers will often do a full day shoot of the space serving interior designers or architects. Typically, they’ll have a day rate of about $1,000 to $3,000.
(59:13) And their goal is to capture the beauty of the space. Sometimes people will describe these as dark and moody photos, but they are edited to look far more natural than what you’ll typically find with a real estate photographer. There’s a whole section in the video where we go into more detail on this, so you can head back to that if you want some more information.
(59:32) Should I ask for raw files? Um, so a lot of times photographers will be unwilling to give raw files for their photos for a few reasons. I think the most common reason is they don’t want you misrepresenting their work, saying like, “Hey, this was shot by this person and then do the editing yourself.
(59:49) It would almost be like if the homeowner went and did additional renovations on the kitchen afterwards and then they’re telling people that you did it.” It’s essentially the same thing. Now, typically people want the raw files for a few reasons. one, you’re looking for more photos that the photographer might have cut out, and that’s just not typically what happens.
(1:00:07) Usually, they are giving you the vast majority, if not all the photos, um, and definitely giving you the best ones. I would say in this scenario, really moving forward, what just needs to happen is a better shot list to make sure you’re getting the important things that you need. And two, you don’t like the editing and you think maybe you can salvage them.
(1:00:26) Uh, we had one client who thought like the more naturallooking photos from the architectural or interior design photographers were essentially less edited. It’s not actually the case. Sometimes even more edited than the real estate ones. I would say often more edited, but they’re done in a way that you can’t tell the edit. So, if you’re just looking for that, you you don’t need the raw files. You need a different type of editing.
(1:00:46) Um, you can show examples of those photos to your photographer, but sometimes that’s just not the style they do. that’s not a style they’re comfortable with. It’s a different skill set and it might be time to look for a new photographer. Can I just edit my photos with AI? It’s a good question, especially as AI is getting better and better.
(1:01:05) Um, I think the answer is, can you convincingly do it without raising red flags for people? Possibly. There are routes you can go down where you can virtually stage a space, but as time goes on, I think I would recommend that less and less.
(1:01:24) I think as soon as people start to have any sort of doubt that this photo is not real, you’re going to lose credibility with your audience. And you have to weigh, is the amount that you’re going to save on not getting a professional photographer for this worth the amount of trust that you could potentially lose with your prospects. Something to think about.
(1:01:43) And then the last question that you’re going to have is, what do I do with these photos now? How do I make sure I’m getting the most ROI out of them? How do I make sure that I’m utilizing them and telling that story in the best way possible? And for that I would refer you to this video where we go over that in much more detail. As a remodeler or a custom home builder, photos are the [music] lifeblood of almost all of your marketing assets.
(00:06) as a marketing company for many of you, we’ve realized that if we can help you get better photos, [music] your marketing not only becomes more beautiful, but becomes much more effective and much more cost effective as well. So, we’ve created this video [music] to be a full guide answering all the client questions that we’ve received over the years about photography, hiring a photographer, what makes the best photos, etc. and we’ll be sharing all the tips we found that will help you avoid the most common mistakes that we
(00:28) see time and time again. By the end of this video, you’ll be equipped with all the information you [music] need to capturing the best photography of your work possible. All right, so here are the chapters for the video. This is everything that we’re going to be going over.
(00:45) If your client success manager sent you this video to solve a specific problem, feel free to jump around to that chapter marker and get the information you need. For those of you joining me for the full video, here’s what we’ll be going through. We’ll start with what great photos actually look like, the five types of shots. Then figure out how to assess your current photographer.
(01:01) Is that photographer the right fit for you? If not, then we can go to how to find a photographer, and then once you have a list of photographers, how to choose what photographer is best for your business. Then we’ll move into how much you should invest in photography, how to communicate and effectively plan with your photographer so you can make sure they capture what actually matters most, and how to stage the space yourself if your photographer is not doing it for you. And after that, we will have the rapid fire FAQ section where we’re just answering the most common questions that we see. All right, let’s start off with
(01:26) the foundation because you can’t judge a photographer or even direct one until you have a good understanding of what good actually even looks like. So, let’s go ahead and define that for you today. Here are the five types of photos that we found every single project is going to need. Starting off with the two most basic shots [music] that just about everybody gets. First, we’re talking about the establishing shot.
(01:45) This is a wide shot that shows the whole space that you’ll be looking at for the rest of the photography. It should show almost the entire space, but not be so much of a wide angle that you get weird distortion and it starts to look more like a real estate photo. Here’s a few bad examples with bathrooms.
(02:03) Bathrooms are especially tricky to get wide angle photos of because they’re tighter. And so often what you’ll see is we have these curved edges on the sides of these photos as opposed to straight lines. This comes from a photographer trying to get the whole space in a single photo. Whereas, if you look at more designoriented bathroom photos like this one, it will intentionally not show the whole space so they can shoot at a tighter focal length and preserve the beauty of the space.
(02:27) The function of these photos is of course to show the whole space, but also to answer the more specific question of where am I? As we go through the rest of the photos, we’ll be showing a lot more detail shots and things like that that if you don’t have the context for it, it can be kind of confusing and you’ll probably miss the full meaning of the photo.
(02:44) Now, one thing to note is this also includes exterior shots of the home, thinking about the story of the project. In this specific example, our client VA did this massive addition on a home, but it was over the edge of a cliff. And so if he had just gotten photography of the interior, you’re missing a large part of the reason why they had to hire him directly because he was one of the only people who would build such a way over that massive cliff.
(03:08) So make sure when you’re thinking about these establishing photos, what is the whole story? What actually does that establishing shot include? Does it need to include exteriors of the house? Does it need to include the neighborhood that you built the work in? Even though establishing shots are probably the most common type of photos, I think those are the types of shots that most people would miss from this category. The second type of photo we’re going to call the design [music] shot.
(03:27) While the first answered the question of where am I, this answers the question of what does the space feel like. These design shots are about emotion, not the function of the space. It’s not about how the space works. It’s about how the space feels to stand in it. The light, the mood, the styling, the way a corner is composed.
(03:44) These are the kind of shots that make people stop scrolling and actually want the space before they can even tell you why. And it’s also the type of shot that is most dependent on the quality of your staging and lighting, which is exactly why we’re going to spend a whole section on staging later on in the video. Now, like I said, these first two categories are the most common shots.
(04:02) And if you’re hiring a photographer who’s not really experienced working with remodelers, then these are probably what you’re going to get. And you might be thinking, of course, we have wide shots and we have close-up shots. What else could we need? Well, there’s a lot of functionality that you don’t realize and the photographer doesn’t realize until you go through and actually explain it.
(04:19) So, let’s go over those next three types now. So, the third type we’re calling the feature shot and answers the question of [music] how do I use it? These specifically highlight key features of your project and the uses of them as well, especially things that aren’t going to be immediately available unless you explain them to a photographer.
(04:40) For example, if you have a hidden dishwasher that pulls out or a hidden cutting board that comes out, a highlight of the specific way that you put in the double ovens or a drop zone that you added into the mudroom. These photos highlight the key things that were important to your clients and also can function for you as upsells later on. What we do with these a lot of times is on websites, we’ll have a key feature section.
(04:58) And in these, we need to have close-ups of all the things that are important. So that way, when a future homeowner is coming and looking at the page, they can see it directly. And often we’ll think to themselves, you know, I never thought about having a dishwasher built in that way, but now that I see it, I would like to explore what it would look like in my kitchen. So these shots aren’t just pretty like the design shots.
(05:18) They’re actually doing a function and having a sales role for you. Now, on to shot number four, the craftsmanship or the detail [music] shot. This answers the question of how much do they really care? So many remallers say that their quality of work and their attention to detail is better than the rest. But what they don’t ever think about is making sure that they have photography actually proving that that’s true.
(05:37) These are the extreme close-ups that show the thoughtful intention in every single detail. The joinery, the grout lines, the hardware, the tile transitions, the problem you solved that nobody else would even notice. So, a note to make here about these detail shots is that you might be thinking of them as similar close-ups to the design shots, but there’s kind of just a key difference here just to spell this out for you. For example, we have this close-up of a plant here as one of the design shots.
(06:00) This is the kind of shot that you would get from an interior design photographer who is naturally inclined just to highlight the beauty of the space. But one of the things to make note of is that they probably are not making a distinction between I’m getting a closeup of a plant which you didn’t build and you didn’t design and I’m getting a closeup of the corner of this island here.
(06:21) The way that this joinery is coming together in their head. They’re just thinking I’m getting detail shots to kind of fill out the full picture. One of the things that you might know as a builder is that inset cabinets are much more difficult to build than your traditional cabinets.
(06:40) However, one of the things you have to realize is that a photographer does not know that. They don’t think about things in that way. They’re thinking about the beauty of the space. They’re not thinking about the practicalities of how maybe you’re able to do it and another builder doesn’t. So, this is something to make sure that you’re educating your photographer on.
(06:51) Like in this photo here, we have close-ups of how evenly these lines are spaced on the cabinet doors. Or, for example, this close-up here of event. No photographer, I don’t think any photographer without prompting would get this photo because event is not super aesthetically pleasing. It’s not something that people highlight. It’s not one of the reasons they’re buying the space.
(07:16) But if you are showing off your attention to work, your quality of detail, this is exactly the kind of photo that you need. So something to take note of, there’s a reason why this is the most commonly missed photo that we get from people. It’s because different photographers you hire will get different sets of photos, but nobody really is specializing in thinking about how can I show off the craftsmanship of this space.
(07:40) So, something to think about with these photos, especially if you are a builder who differentiates themselves based on the quality of your craftsmanship, this might give you actually a chance to prove uh what makes you so different. The last type of photo is the matching before and [music] after shot. And the main reason people miss this is simply because they’re not getting enough before shots or not getting the right before shot to match an after shot.
(08:03) So before we talk about getting a professional after that matches it, the first thing you got to just take note of is when you’re going and doing your final walkthrough of the project before people start coming in and making any changes, you want to go through and take pictures of everything. You want to have wide angles of all the rooms and then any close-ups that you’re going to change later on.
(08:20) If you know you’re going to be taking out a window and replacing it with a different one, go ahead and go through and take pictures of that. You’re not going to regret having too many of these photos. I wouldn’t worry about these being professional in the sense of making sure that they’re extremely well shot. I would worry more about having the right coverage, making sure that you’re shooting everything in the space.
(08:36) The best time to do this is on the very first day of demo before anything is destroyed. Then you have the actual design renderings of the space so you know which parts you’re going to want to highlight further on. This is especially important when you’re doing things like taking out walls because the angle that you’re taking the photo and the before might be different than if you’re actually visualizing what the space looks like without the wall. So, here we have a good example of where our client originally got a photo of the after that
(08:59) looks like this, but it doesn’t really align very well with the before photo. As you can see, flipping back and forth between them, it’s a little hard to line these two images up and understand fully what changed. So then afterwards they came in and they shot this photo which gives it much better.
(09:17) It’s closer to the same angle as this one. It shows a little bit of that stair rail and giving you some context. And overall it’s a better photo to match. Now I would say for this one I think it could be even closer.
(09:36) Like for example, we have this opening here on the right that I’m assuming they added in, but we don’t see that in this photo. Again, I’m assuming that’s what got added in, but I don’t know that. and the camera’s pushed a little bit farther back and we don’t see as deep into the space as we do in this photo. And so even though this is still a good after photo, that is kind of something I would critique or change about this if they were able to go back and shoot it again. It’s still functional. It’s just here’s what to do better the next time.
(09:58) So best case scenario here is you have a before photo, a rendering, and an after photo that all match. These can help make it very clear to homeowners after the fact how did the space actually change? and start to imagine like, “Oh, this space looks so different. I don’t think I would have imagined this in my own space.
(10:16) ” It starts to open them up to new possibilities in their own home. So, take a second, actually go through your photo galleries of your projects and see, are you hitting all of these? Are you hitting most of them? Where do you have gaps? At the very least, this will give you some definitions and wordings to use with your photographer to start immediately improving your photos.
(10:33) So, now that we know what a successful shoot looks like, let’s actually look at how to start improving your photos. And the first step to that is assessing your current photos and your current photographer. [music] All right, so assessing your photos. A lot of times the fixes can be as easy as having a conversation with your photographer and understanding what you need and being able to to tell them that. Sometimes though, you’ll have a photographer that is not a good fit.
(11:01) And so we’re going to go over what both of those look like in this category here. So, here’s a quick checklist of questions that you can ask yourself when going through your photos from your photographer. One, do the photos look natural or heavily edited? Oftent times, especially if you’re working with somebody who’s primarily in real estate photography, you’ll end up with photos that look unnatural.
(11:21) And you may not have the words for it, but you can recognize it when you see it. And here’s a bunch of examples of that now. And you might actually think these photos look fine until you see what we do here, where this photo here, we actually edited. It actually looked like this originally.
(11:39) And when you start to actually look at the differences between these two, we’ve seen this before on some of our photo shoots where you’ll hand it to somebody and they’ll do one of these heavy edits like maybe this wall color is actually kind of an off yellow, like a beige or something, but when they come in, they brighten everything so much that when we look at the edited version now, it’s just plain white.
(11:57) We’ve literally had a designer come back and say, “Hey, I looked at these photos and they look nice, but that is not the wall color for this space. It doesn’t work. it doesn’t fit the feeling that the client wanted. And then we had to go back and look and be like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I see what you’re saying.” Like literally in the edit, they changed the wall color. So, thinking through stuff like that, as well as like if you’re looking at the emphasis of the photos here in this one, the outside is so properly exposed, it’s almost like the area that is like the brightest and has the most contrast. Your eye is naturally drawn to that. Whereas in this toned down one, the
(12:26) outside is a little bit overexposed, a little bit desaturated, and in doing so, it draws more attention to the space. Another thing to look out for is overall just really blown out and overly saturated photos like these ones I showed here at the beginning.
(12:44) These you have, it’s almost hard to really look at it because they’ve increased the contrast so much and the saturation so much it doesn’t look realistic. And while it is eye-catching because of how distinct it is, it doesn’t feel like a space you’d actually like to be in. It doesn’t feel pleasant.
(13:04) Here in this house photo, clearly we have a fake sky, which they will do a lot of times in exterior shots. Sometimes you can do it well, but in the bad ones, you’ll be able to really tell that’s what’s going on here. Like here’s a photo that clearly is supposed to be nighttime, but it’s still lit like it’s the daytime. And one of the things I want to clear up here is it’s not that you’re actually looking for sometimes we’ve heard people say they want raw photos or they want them to look natural. It doesn’t mean that you’re actually getting an unedited photo. It’s that they are still highly
(13:29) edited, but they’re edited in a way that makes them look more natural. It’s actually a more difficult look to pull off. It’s more pleasing to the eye and it looks more like what the space would look like if you actually walked in there.
(13:46) And you can see in these two examples, we have a higher contrast version on this side with more saturated colors that pops, but the right one feels more like what the space would actually feel like if you walked in there. I think one of the most common signs of the overedited photo is that the windows are all perfectly exposed. Like here’s an example of one that’s overexposed, where the windows are brighter than everything.
(14:03) And if you were just taking a picture of the outside, it’d be too bright to take that photo. And here’s kind of the look that a lot of real estate photographers will take where the outside photos are so perfectly exposed it looks unnatural. It’s almost like it’s the uncanny valley of photos. Like it looks too perfect to be real.
(14:23) So hopefully that gives you some idea of the differences you might find between an overedited photo and ones that are more naturally edited. Question number two, do they shoot a good mix of all the photos that we talked about in section one? or as you go through your photos, are you seeing they’re mostly wide room shots like here? This is an example of a portfolio photos that are all wide shots.
(14:41) We really have very minimal detail shots. Whereas, if you can contrast that with this portfolio here, we have kind of some wide shots that show you the space. We have those close-up details of the sink over here, of the cookbook over here. Each of these photos tells a different thing to the audience.
(15:01) And as you get more photos, you get closer and closer to the experience of somebody being able to walk through the space, find something that they like, and then zoom in on it. Basically, they come in, they go, they look a little bit closer to it. And when you’re just getting those wide angle photos, you’re missing out on that.
(15:16) So, kind of like I said at the end of the first section, go through and actually assess, do I have each of the five photo types in my photo galleries? Is this something that my photographer is naturally getting? Next, when you look at the shots of your specific features in the kitchen, do they look natural and beautiful and you can imagine them in the space or do they look like they’re taken from odd angles and they do show the point, but there’s not much thought to the composition or the beauty of the photo.
(15:40) I’m hoping that as I’m showing these on screen, you’re seeing like, yeah, I have some photos like that or I’ve had some and I haven’t thought much of them, but now that I’m seeing those more designoriented shots that you showed earlier in the video, I can see the difference. If we go back to these design shots from earlier, you have very intentional framing.
(16:01) All the lines in this one, for example, are very flat and vertical, you can tell there’s a lot of intentionality that went into every single one of these shots, getting all of the angles exactly right. Whereas when we look back at these photos again, you have odd heights like somebody’s like seven foot tall in this room just looking down on everything or this weird angle where you’re looking directly into the sink.
(16:24) Like here’s two examples of different ways that a person could shoot a sink. Here’s the bad example and the good one. And without getting into all of the technical information of like exactly everything they’re doing, I’m hoping I can give you enough examples that you can start to see, oh yeah, actually my photos do look more like the first type than the second.
(16:43) So, if you’re getting these types of photos consistently, it could very well be the sign of an immature photographer who knows how to set step back in the room, set up a tripod, and take a wide shot, but isn’t really sure how to compose a shot of something specifically. And then lastly, are they open to direction? When you tell them, hey, I want to tone these down.
(17:01) Maybe you can show them an example of what you’re looking for, and they never can quite nail it. That might be a sign that that just is their style. I I’ve heard some people say that they think like, well, they could just edit a different style. Um, but one of the things that’s important to know, like I said a little bit earlier, is that these natural photos are not an easier look to pull off. It’s not that they’re doing less editing.
(17:25) It is very much that somebody who is doing real estate photography on the daily, the level of expertise required for that is much lower than the level of expertise that you’re asking for when you’re showing them these awardwinning architectural design photography shots. So, just something to keep in mind. It’s not as simple as, well, you know, they just need to turn the the brightness down and they need to turn the desaturation.
(17:51) There’s a lot more going on here that if they don’t have the eye for it, they don’t have the desire to shoot it, you can keep telling them, but it may take them longer to get to that point of expertise than you’re really wanting to spend. Just something to keep in mind. So, if going through all these questions and you feel like your photographer nailed it, then great.
(18:09) You can probably skip ahead to communicating with your photographer and getting the most out of them. But if you’re curious about how could you get a better result with a different photographer, in this next section, we’re going to be doing more education on what are the different types of photographers out there, how do you find them, and how can you make sure you’re choosing the right one for your business? Even if you’ve already done the research and you’re telling me, “I’ve already looked and I’ve seen and there’s no good people in my area.” Hopefully, this section will help you to see, well, there’s probably a few places
(18:34) you haven’t checked or just some things you haven’t been willing to consider. In smaller markets, it can be harder to find a photographer. This is a chart that I made with Claude. I had it go through and do a lot of research on the density of photographers, actually finding verified photographers in these cities.
(19:01) Now, while this isn’t exact, this is a good representation of there are definitely heat spots where there are a ton of photographers to choose from. And there are definitely areas where you can go through, find where you live, and be like, “Yeah, not a lot to choose from.” Now, if you’re in these areas where you see like a single dot, don’t freak out because this is not an exhaustive list by any means.
(19:19) This is purely just a sample of all the different photographers just to kind of show you here’s a representative sample of about how many you can expect in your area. If you land in one of those areas that have an abundance of photographers, you can probably skip to the next section where we’re talking about how to narrow that list down and how to pick a good photographer.
(19:37) If you’re in one of these areas that has less than an abundance of photographers, then in this section we’ll be covering how can you actually find the photographer. There’s probably a few methods that you aren’t thinking of right now. The first thing obviously, yes, you can Google residential photographer, interior design photographer, architectural photographer, or even just photographer.
(19:55) If nothing really comes up there in your area, it’s very possible that your photographer is not investing in SEO and is not found on search. So, a couple other avenues you can look for them is one, instead of searching for the photographers, search for architects in your area. Search for interior designers in your area.
(20:12) Very very often these people will link to the photographers that captured their work either on their website or in their social media. That can often lead you back to people who are actively working in their area but just not listed on Google. If you found architects, similar remodelers, builders, or designers that have photos but it’s not listed who it is, then at that point then you can go and actually call these people and see if they can give you a reference. Additionally, you could look up the ASMP listings in your
(20:38) area to find people that are actually listed with the local photography groups. Here are two different sites I found by different groups. Um, find aphotographer.com and asmpp.orgfind aphotographer. These are specifically designed for photographers coming in saying, “Hey, I want work.” And now the website is able to match a somebody looking for work with somebody that is willing to do it.
(21:01) I mean, you can see from this example, some people have just their first name, last name, and information to contact them. Some people don’t have a website on here. So, definitely do your verification from here. But, at the very least, this will give you some leads to follow up on if you have absolutely nothing.
(21:21) And then if you’ve gone through all of this stuff, you’re in one of those sparse areas and you really don’t have anybody in the right category in your area. Then at that point, as a last case scenario, instead of hiring maybe your cousin who likes photography or just somebody in your uh company who’s kind of good with a camera, I would then go out and honestly over that person, I would hire just a standard photographer, maybe a portrait photographer, a wedding photographer with the caveat of you’re going to have to invest a little bit more.
(21:45) not necessarily monetarily, but more of your time and energy into making sure you’re getting the right photos. But that’s what the rest of the video is for. So, now we’re going to transition to picking that correct photographer of the options that you have. And then after that, we’re going into how to get the most from that photographer.
(22:01) What are the things that you can train them on? How can you make sure you’re getting the right assets for your project? If you’ve gone through all of these options and you still don’t have anybody, I would suggest looking farther or opening yourself up to paying more. Oftentimes when we’ve talked to people, it’s not truly that there are no photographers.
(22:18) It’s that there are photographers that are a little bit farther than they would like or there are photographers that are a little bit more expensive than they would like. In those cases, I would really suggest that you invest in the foundational photography that you need for the rest of your marketing assets. Bite the bullet, take that relationship, and I don’t think you’ll regret it.
(22:37) [music] So, if you’re specifically looking for a photographer to shoot interior spaces, what you’ll most likely find is a real estate photographer or an architectural design or maybe even an interior design photographer. So, for the sake of this video, I’m going to kind of combine an architectural photographer and an interior design photographer.
(22:56) While they do have differences, they’re more minor compared to those differences between the two of them and a real estate photographer. All right, so let’s talk through the pros and cons. the main differences between those types of photographers. So, a real estate photographer obviously serves realtors.
(23:14) Their whole job is to make the space look big, bright, and easy to walk through. They produce fast, high volume work. They’re usually doing about a 2hour shoot, and they’re often about $150 to $500 per shoot. Their goal is to maximize the space because space sells, and their style is most likely going to be more light and bright and kind of that heavily edited look that we talked about earlier.
(23:39) problems that you’re going to run into if you use them is that you’re going to get a lot of these wide shots. And I would be less confident in their ability to artfully capture those close-up features or the design shots that you’re looking for. So, looking through these photos, you see a lot of those kind of like key details I was telling you to look out for earlier. Like we have like here again, we have another example of those windows that are perfectly exposed.
(23:59) It’s a little bit unnatural to your experience when you’re standing in the space. They’re all wide angles. There’s very little set dressing or intentionality to the the beauty of the space. And they have that high contrast overedited look we talked about.
(24:16) Now, one of the things I’ll make note of that we’re going to come back to later, but I just want to make note of here so that you understand the importance is a lot of this what you’re seeing the difference here, like why these photos don’t look good actually isn’t those things. It’s not the overedited, it’s not the uh wide angle photos. Um, but a lot of it is the staging of the photos. Like you have all these empty rooms. I actually have some examples here.
(24:38) You have actual intentionality to staging and it makes a very big difference. And I really do think the more that I go through this, it is the most important part of your photography. May maybe second most, but it is for sure one of the top two most important parts of your photography. And oftentimes it’s something that’s entirely in your control.
(24:57) So definitely make sure you check out that section on staging if that’s something that you have limited confidence in. So that’s the real estate photographer. On the other hand, we have the interior design or the architectural photographer. And these photographers obviously serve designers and architects.
(25:13) Their kind of shoots are what gets into publications like Architectural Digest or Bare Homes and Gardens. They have fewer shoots and each of them take far longer to do the shoot. often booking for a full day rate from 1,000 to upward of $3,000. Some of them will shoot at an hourly rate. It just depends on the person you’re talking to.
(25:31) Now, unlike real estate photographers, their goal is to capture the beauty of the space. They aren’t looking to sell the space. They’re not focused on ROI. They’re purely focused on the aesthetics of the photo, making everything look as beautiful as possible. Some people describe their style as more dark and moody, but to my eye, I think these look much more natural, and sometimes that is darker, but I don’t think that’s a bad look.
(25:56) It’s what aligns you more with an architectural digest as opposed to a Zillow listing. Now, problems that you’re going to run into with them is that they’re still shooting for a different audience typically. So, they’re not thinking about the builder mindset. So, even people we know, even our clients who have gotten these kinds of photographers still have the problem of they’ll miss important details without the structure.
(26:12) Which is why later on we’re going to be going over exactly how to communicate with them and get the most out of them. So, even amongst interior design or architectural photographers, if you have a selection where you’re looking at a few different ones of those and you’re trying to make that distinction, a couple of questions that you should be thinking about, a couple things to ask.
(26:30) Who takes care of the styling? Some of them will have interior designers that they work with, but in most cases that will be on you to take care of the staging of the photos. Where are the majority of their photos? Is this a photographer that does everything, or is it one that really specializes in residential markets? Here’s a good example of a photographer who says they’re residential, but if we look at their portfolio, they do a lot of commercial work.
(26:58) And I honestly think that bleeds over into their residential work to make it look even then a little bit commercial. And I’ve also seen examples of photographers who are really real estate photographers who claim to be architectural or interior design photographers, but you can still see that real estate style bleeding into what they claim to be this different style of photography.
(27:17) Stuff like this especially that looks incredibly overpolished honestly is an exterior shot that somehow looks like it’s an interior shot. Stuff like this is what I mean by commercial stuff that bleeds uh into the residential. Technically, yes, this is a residence, but it’s so clean. And this isn’t real staging. That’s definitely virtually staged.
(27:42) To me, especially as we are getting into an era of more AI upscaled and AI edited photos. To me, I think these photos are going to become less and less valuable to you because these have that look. We’re at the point now where even if this isn’t AI, people are going to look at these photos and be like, “Well, that’s just AI.
(28:00) ” it’s going to lose credibility very quickly, which is why I think you need to lean more into the very naturalistic looking photos. I can understand why people do it. It can be a large hassle to stage a space, especially if you don’t have an expertise in that. Maybe you don’t have a designer, like you outsource your designs to another company and you don’t have somebody constantly with you who understands interior design.
(28:19) I can see why you would do it, but I think the cons outweigh the benefits of it, which again is why we’re going through a whole section at the end of this video on staging. All right, so moving into how much to invest in your photographer. [music] You just saw the gap. There was a clear gap between what you might be typically expecting from a real estate photographer and these higherend photographers.
(28:47) And you might have immediately thought to yourself, well, I bet I could get a real estate photographer to do a good job. And you might. Um, but in a lot of cases, I think I want to help talk you out of that. Not because I have some sort of inside deal with these photographers. Not because it’s more virtuous to spend more money on your photos, but because I think the half measure is the one that actually wastes more money.
(29:04) My first point here is thinking about the very beginning of this video where I talked about your photos are the foundation for the rest of your marketing assets. We’ve seen for ourselves the insane difference in quality that can happen as a result of just better photos.
(29:22) I mean, we do a lot of websites for people and we can make very, very beautiful websites, but if you throw bad photos on there, there’s really not much we can do. Here’s screen recordings. I went through and took the same website and just replace the photos. And you can see the just the difference in value that you’re presenting, the difference in quality of remodeler that you’re presenting yourself as.
(29:40) Even if you have everything else right, you have the right branding, you have the right website, you have the right copy, it doesn’t matter if your photos do not align with that. The same is true for your ads, your social media, direct mail that you take care of or yard signs, anything like that.
(29:59) And on top of that, you have to realize that when you’re going with a cheaper photographer or somebody that has less proven work, you are taking a risk that you might lose quality photos of your best work. There is probably a lot more that goes into photography than immediately is apparent to you. For example, here’s a quick list of the things that I do with photography that you don’t need to know, but it’s important for you to know that you don’t know them. Deciding between HDR shoot or a flamant shoot.
(30:21) Knowing how to edit an HDR shoot versus a flamant shoot. balancing the color of the photos and masking out and distracting objects without removing important details. Cropping the photo and aligning your verticals and horizontals to make sure that everything in the photo is perfectly plum and perfectly level.
(30:38) As well as all that, a stylistic coloring of the photo to match the feeling of the space. Photographers who are very good at photography make it look natural. And so then it can seem as if it’s very easy to do and anybody with an expensive camera can get it done. It’s just not the case. That’s why I would invest in a professional photographer who knows what they’re doing.
(30:58) So, I would just encourage you to go all the way on this and treat it like an investment that will last you for multiple years. It’s turning a project that you did one time and turning into a project that you can now used as a sales asset for the next three, four years to come. And if that requires that you’re shooting less of your projects, oftentimes what we’ve seen from our perspective is that it’d be better to capture three of your projects in a very high quality format and actually have those be good representations of your work as opposed to capturing 10 projects halfhazardly. So now let’s actually make sure you’re getting your money’s worth with your
(31:26) photographer. Let’s talk about planning with your photographer and getting the most out of your photography. I would say most of the frustration that we’ve seen with our clients comes from not always just having the wrong photographer, but having the right photographer and not communicating with them the value that needs to get expressed across through the photos.
(31:46) Many times we’ve been at the point where they have an amazing feature the client loved, but honestly they just didn’t think of it in time to get photos of it and now we can’t show it to people on the site.
(32:00) I’ll tell you, we had one client that does a lot of custom carpentry, and they wanted to get a lot of close-up detail shots of their work to show the level of craftsmanship that they put into their work. And they told their photographer, “Hey, make sure you get a lot of close-ups in this room.” And what they got back was close-ups of some of the set dressing, the cookbooks, the plants, and the ping pong table in the corner.
(32:22) Now, not that these weren’t beautiful photos, but those do not sell their work. that’s not at all what they were trying to express. So, I built a photographer prep sheet here. And the point of this document is both for your photographer to reference, but mainly it’s for you to go through and force yourself to sit down and actually answer these questions and think through what were the important aspects of the project. You’ll see as we go through and answer them all.
(32:45) Unless you’re actually forced to take the time to sit and think for a second about what actually was important to the homeowner, you’re going to miss things. and your photographer is going to miss things, but it’s not the photographer’s fault. It’s the fact that they were missing information. So, honestly, along with staging, this might be one of the most important pieces in this whole video.
(33:03) The people that are going to get the best photos are the people that are going to take the time up front to plan out what photos they need and really give all that information over to their photographer. So, it’s seven questions and we’ll walk through it here. Question number one, what’s the full scope of the project? Sometimes it’s like, “Yes, we did this kitchen, but we also added a little drop zone here in this mud room, or we did this kitchen, and we also updated some vanities in the bathroom.
(33:27) What’s the full scope to make sure that you’re capturing everything in this home?” Number two, who was this built for, and what did they want out of the space? I would give a couple sentences here, like an example being, we had empty nesters looking to host family in the holidays, or it was an aging and place bathroom renovation. There’s a growing family addition.
(33:44) what what was kind of the story here? Then the photographer can take this information with them while they’re shooting and it can change the way they shoot the space. And don’t miss on the first part of this question the the first part where it was who was this built for.
(33:58) Give us some personal information about where they’re at in life, what their goals are, what in their life caused them to do this remodel. Now, oftentimes people don’t take it this last step and you miss a lot of the functionality of how is a homeowner going to view this space and it can change the way a photographer shoots the space.
(34:15) Number three, do you have any before photos, floor plans, renderings that would be helpful to provide to the photographer so they can match those angles? Number four, which two to six elements should get the most attention and why does each one matter to the homeowner? So, this can just be a bulleted list, but sometimes it can be helpful to have to actually manually go through and say, well, we added this double oven and why did why was that important to them? making sure that we’re capturing that double oven or the pullout dishwasher, keeping those things tucked away or maybe it’s expanding the island. What were the key features that were important to the homeowner and how
(34:44) can we feature them in the photography? A couple things to note on this before we move on is here’s actually an example for one of our clients. This is Mcomesy Builders and overall these photos are fantastic. These are really good.
(35:02) They have a lot of detail shots, but if there’s anything that I could critique or change, here’s an example of what we were talking about earlier about having a feature that you don’t have a closeup of. We have here a Wolf range and a pizza oven built for hosting. And we do have these items in the in the photo. You can see them there. Um, but they aren’t highlighted in the same way. It’s not as intuitive what the photo is of.
(35:20) Whereas, if we look over at the mudroom, we have a picture that perfectly shows the whole mudroom. This is how we sell things on the site. This is how other future homeowners are going to see what options to choose from, what features they want to put into their own kitchen.
(35:37) And so, if you don’t go through and plan out what those features are ahead of time, what was so important to them, then you’ll end up in the case scenario where you’re kind of making a photo work on the site, you could have a photo that specifically highlights what you’re looking for.
(35:49) Number five, now this one’s going to make sure that you’re getting those craftsmanship photos that you need. What craftsmanship or detail deserves a close-up? We’re looking for things like specific details you made in the grout lines, the joinery, the hardware, transitions. Think about any small details that you had to specifically account for or change to make the project as perfect as possible.
(36:06) We want to make sure that these small details are not lost, that your team and your project managers are getting credit for these small things that they’re doing. Number six, are there any unusual shots that you would like to help tell a story? Now, this is something to think through. Like, I’ll give you a few examples. Earlier we talked about that VA house that was on the edge of a cliff.
(36:26) Taking an unusual shot with a drone of the house going over the cliff side is not something that’s typically in a scope of work, but was actually crucial for that story. We had another project where somebody did an addition onto a house, but they took all interior photos and then realized after the fact, you actually can’t really tell we did an addition.
(36:44) It just looks like we renovated a living room. Having that exterior shot of the home would have really been able to help them see like, no, here was the original house and here’s what we added on. And as well, if it’s something like a lakehouse, a vacation home where the actual environment around the home is integral to the story, something like a window with a big view was important to them because they have this beautiful view. Making sure you’re capturing photos of that as well to help tell that story.
(37:09) And then number seven, is there anything you do not want to emphasize? A lot of times you’ll be like, “Hey, we did this kitchen over here, but these are pre-existing cabinets. We don’t need to feature those.” Stuff like that. So, as you’re prepping for your shoot, I would say fill out this form, take some time, go over it, and really think through what are the things we have to capture.
(37:25) Creating a shot list for your photographer, making sure there are no gaps when you get those photos back. All right, so moving a little bit closer to the shoot now. Now that we have prepped for the shoot, we have our shot list. Let’s talk a little bit about staging. [music] Staging is one of the most important parts of a beautiful project photo.
(37:45) And often times people will just not take it that last step to make a difference. The best staging is usually [music] natural and almost invisible. You just don’t think about it being staged. You just think about how beautiful the space is. [music] And it’s a lot of times you don’t recognize the staging until you remove it from the photo and you realize that it’s empty.
(38:04) So, if you’re going to be doing the staging yourself, there’s a few things to keep in mind. First off, staging is the storytelling of the project. It’s the fastest way to convey the meaning of a space, the use of a space. For example, a pair of shoes in a mudroom, or wine glasses in the pullout dishwasher, a towel draped over the side of a soaking tub, a book and reading lamp on a nightstand. And none of these things are random.
(38:27) They all convey the usage of the space and help people picture what it would be like if they actually lived there. How would I actually interact with this home? On top of that, they can also just add for some of those very good design, more emotional shots like here in this project that Rainy Blair Weidman did. You did not create the plant.
(38:44) However, the plant adds to the feeling of the space, the natural feeling to it. And when you put that in context of the rest of the gallery, you now see how it can help play into telling the whole picture of the story. There are routes you can go down where you can virtually stage a space, but as time goes on, I think I would recommend that less and less for the same reason I talked about earlier that I think as soon as people start to have any sort of doubt that this photo is not real, you’re going to lose credibility with your audience. Even if
(39:08) the photo of the space is 100% real, but now you’ve put fake furniture in it, sometimes that is enough to make a homer look at the photo, decide that it’s fake, and immediately go on to the next website. If you need to do that full-on staging with furniture and bringing in art and things like that, it’s definitely worth hiring a custom service to come in and do that for you. Now, for the things where you’re doing light staging, that’s kind of what we’re going to be covering in this video.
(39:32) Going through removing clutter from the photo, adding in little decor, plants, bowls of fruit, things like that. That’s all stuff that can entirely be done by your team. Typically, a designer on your team or someone who enjoys it.
(39:48) But regardless, we’re going to be going through a quick crash course on how to do staging in photos. Step one is mostly subtraction at first. You want to take a lot of stuff out of the photo before you ever start adding things back in. It’s funny, [music] you need to remove more than you think you do. Little things like when you first go in, I I remember when I was first doing photos, like things like you would see soap dispensers or trash cans, maybe paper towel rolls, like you’re like, “Well, these would actually be in the space.
(40:11) ” and they would, but if unless they’re actually adding to the aesthetics of the space, typically you can take those out and you’ll never notice. They’re actually more of an eyesore when you leave them in. So, we want to remove those function items. Uh, anything with a logo or label that could be distracting, look like some sort of product placement, you want to get rid of that.
(40:30) Then, you want to take care of cords, remotes, things like that. One last thing to always check is in the reflections of say a window, a mirror, or even like an oven. Sometimes you’ll see things in the reflection of that or outside of the windows. I’ve seen people take photos of kitchens and just outside the window they’ll have like construction material just out of frame. Those can be removed now.
(40:50) But it’s simple enough to just go ahead and get that out of the photo before you shoot. Like in this example here, I’m in Lightroom, the most common editing software for photographers, and you have the option to go through and remove all this junk. But one of the side effects of it is it actually physically changed that these sliding glass doors into something that’s not sliding glass doors.
(41:14) So as you’re going through and doing that, sometimes it will work out fine, but you don’t want to count on that because other times it will go through and actually delete crucial information about your project that you don’t want to put your name on a photo that looks like this here. So AI removal is fantastic and can fix minor details. It’s not something you want to rely on to fix every single thing.
(41:34) An additional note to make here is that it can be hard at first from personal experience removing a homeowner’s personal items from their home. Um, one I I would just you just have to push through it. Here’s a list of lines generated by ChatGBT of things you could say to them. This part can be difficult, but it is definitely still essential.
(41:58) So, when you’re in that space where you have to make that decision of, do we remove this or do we not? Sometimes it can be tempting to be like, no, I’m sure it will be fine. If you have the question, remove it and replace it. Once we’ve removed everything out of the space, now we can begin to start adding things back in that add to the feeling of the space. [music] So, let’s move on to styling the space.
(42:17) So, a few styling principles that do most of the work are one, group in odd numbers. Threes often look like they’re very intentionally placed. pairs and even rows of things can look stiff. Clustering small items in groups of threes typically looks best. There is some science and psychology behind this. People say things like your brain easily cancels them out, like it pairs things off and then cancels them out, whereas it takes more time for it to study groups of threes.
(42:40) Regardless, I think it just looks better. So, just go by that because it just looks better. Number two, varying the height of objects and making triangles. Tall, medium, short next to each other, a stack of books, a vase, a small bowl reads as styled. Whereas, if you have the same height rows, it feels very bland.
(42:59) And again, you don’t have to worry about all the psychology of it, but you can definitely see a difference between a photo like this and a photo like this. Number three, thinking about layering texture on top of each other. So, a throw blanket with a slight deliberate drape or a couple pillows. Texture is what makes the space feel warm instead of empty.
(43:18) A great example of this is always when people drape a towel over the bathtub. And lastly, fluffing and shaping the the pillows and things like that. You can plop the pillows. You know, people do that karate chop method. Straighten the rugs. Make sure that any art or hanging items on the wall are nice and straight. And really just doing those fine details right at the end.
(43:36) I really like little things like these, like the edge of this book on the arm of the chair. Like you can imagine yourself getting up to going and getting another drink or something like that while you’re reading. And this is what the space looks like while you’re doing it. You’ll definitely want to build a staging kit if you don’t already have one.
(43:55) [music] Here’s a small list of items here that you could go ahead and purchase and reuse in different spaces. While you don’t have to invest a lot in these things, I would suggest investing in stuff that is highquality. If you’re buying fake plants, make sure that they are highquality, very realistic fake plants.
(44:13) You don’t want somebody looking at your photo of a $200,000 kitchen remodel and then seeing cheap cookbooks and cutting boards and fake plants in there. Along with like a standard kit that you’d be traveling around with, there’s also importance to getting fresh things each time. A lot of times I’ve seen clients will have a wine bottle, fresh bread, some fruit, and even a fresh bouquet of flowers that they can move around the space as needed.
(44:31) There are often times that when prepping the space, you’ll go through and turn all the lights on, making [music] sure you get all the underc cabinet lighting. Um, that’s something to note with a photographer. If you specifically need to capture under cabinet lighting, as you get into those higherend architectural and interior design photos, if you actually look through them, you’ll notice almost all of them, they rely on natural lighting, or at least what looks like natural lighting, and they turn off those interior lights.
(44:55) It’s funny how natural it looks because you literally don’t notice it at first. But as I go through and look at each of these photos, you can see there is literally not a single interior light unless you’re counting the fireplace that’s turned on. In these photos, they are completely naturally lit or what looks like natural lighting.
(45:12) Oftent times it will be they’ll have lighting off camera um that is shooting to mimic the sun. Sometimes it will be the actual sun. Sometimes they’ll do that. So, if you have a photographer that brings in lights, that’s not a bad thing. Um, it’s more about the the finished product.
(45:30) Now, the reason for this a lot of times is that they don’t want the different color temperatures mixing. So, the light coming in from the windows is pretty blue and often times the light coming from the interior lights are orange and the competing of those two colors can make a photo look unnatural. Here’s a photo that I’ve kind of changed in post to take those blue levels and bring them back up to orange.
(45:48) So you can kind of see that it looks a little bit more flat, a little bit more uniform, but it’s still not the same as actually having all the same color light in the space at the time. So typically the best solution is to keep the lights off and just use natural lighting or what looks like natural lighting to light up the whole space.
(46:06) There are methods that they can get around where they can show the interior lighting and also not affect the color temperatures too much, but it’s a more specific process and a lot of times it requires them to physically shoot the photo differently. Um, not also do they just have to turn them on, but they have to do different exposure settings while they’re shooting.
(46:23) So, definitely definitely definitely if that’s something you’re doing, make sure that you make the photographer well aware of it so they can prep for that when they’re planning their shoot. And I want to show you this last example to show you how impactful lighting actually is. Here’s a post from NS Builders and they do the first of all, they just do these very cool during shoots that they professionally shoot and you have a space that there’s no staging here.
(46:48) There’s no beautiful finished carpentry or anything like that. It is really just composition and lighting that makes these photos look beautiful. So again, I’m just kind of showing you these to show you the impact that lighting can have.
(47:04) And if your photographer is going through and changing lighting or turning stuff off, work with them, but also trust that they know what they’re doing. If you’ve taken all the steps up until this point of finding the right photographer, then you can trust that this is a person who knows what they’re doing with lighting. But past that, it really is on the photographer to do their part, make the space look as beautiful as it does in person in the photos, and then really the only thing for you to worry about is utilization of the photos, which we’ll focus on in another video. But if you followed these steps, you have the right photographer, you’ve had good communication with them,
(47:29) you’ve done the expectation set and created the shot list, you really should be set to get absolutely stunning photos of your work from this point moving forward. All right, let’s tackle some FAQs. Now, there are going to be some repeat information from the rest of the video to here um specifically for people just coming into the FAQs just to get their quick questions answered.
(47:52) So, number one, what if there is no good photographer in my area? So, I addressed this a little bit earlier in the video, and you can go back to finding the right photographer if you want more information on this, but in smaller markets, it can be harder to find a photographer.
(48:10) So, if you happen to fall in one of these areas where you have very few photographers, there are a few set of steps that you can follow that you maybe haven’t thought about. The first thing obviously yes you can Google residential photographer, interior design photographer, architectural photographer or even just photographer. If nothing really comes up there in your area, it’s very possible that your photographer is not investing in SEO and is not found on search.
(48:32) So a couple other avenues you can look for them is one instead of searching for the photographers, search for architects in your area. Search for interior designers in your area. Very very often these people will link to the photographers that captured their work either on their website or in their social media. That can often lead you back to people who are actively working in their area but just not listed on Google.
(48:50) If you found architects, similar remodelers, builders, or designers that have photos but it’s not listed who it is, then at that point then you can go and actually call these people and see if they can give you a reference. Additionally, you could look up the ASMP listings in your area to find people that are actually listed with the local photography groups.
(49:10) Here are two different sites I found by different groups. Find aphotographer.com and asmpp.org/findotographer. These are specifically designed for photographers coming in saying, “Hey, I want work.” And now the website is able to match a somebody looking for work with somebody that is willing to do it.
(49:28) I mean, you can see from this example, some people have just their first name, last name, and information to contact them. Some people don’t have a website on here. So, definitely do your verification from here. But, at the very least, this will give you some leads to follow up on if you have absolutely nothing.
(49:47) The benefit of this is you’re getting somebody that is surely verified and further on in their career, but there are plenty of photographers in your area who are probably not on these lists. Just another place to check. If you are very desperate, you can then go on to wedding photographers and portrait photographers. However, I would take those with extreme caution.
(50:05) I would only use that in the example that you really truly truly cannot find anybody who does the other ones. The things that I would be looking for in that case is making sure I’m getting somebody who can shoot beautiful work. Like as you’re looking through, think about the things that we talked about earlier about the detail shots. They have good composition. They made sure that things are aligned and all the shots are intentional. there’s nice lighting in the photos.
(50:24) If you have somebody that knows how to work a camera and knows how to recognize those kinds of beauty, that’s a good starting point. But what you’ll need to do from there is do the education on. Here’s what’s important to me. Here’s what we need to capture with the project. All the things that they will miss for sure if you don’t highlight uh the importance of them, especially if they’re not used to shooting interiors.
(50:46) If you’ve gone through all of these options and you still don’t have anybody, I would suggest looking farther or opening yourself up to paying more. Oftentimes when we’ve talked to people, it’s not truly that there are no photographers. It’s that there are photographers that are a little bit farther than they would like or there are photographers that are a little bit more expensive than they would like.
(51:04) In those cases, I would really suggest that you invest in the foundational photography that you need for the rest of your marketing assets. bite the bullet. Take that relationship and I don’t think you’ll regret it. Whose job is staging? Mine or the [music] photographers? Yeah. So, oftentimes, uh, especially as you get higher end, a lot of photographers will expect the staging to be done as they come in.
(51:28) They might help with light styling, things like that, making the space looks nice, moving furniture slightly, fluffing pillows, things like that. But mostly, in most cases, this is going to be on you to do that. So, for that, if that’s not something you’re used to, I would point you to the section of the video where we go through a crash course on staging. Number five, do I need to be on site for the shoot and how involved should I be? Yeah.
(51:45) Um, a few of our clients have talked about not really wanting to take the time to be there. Obviously, I’m going to suggest that you are there for the shoot or at the very least you’ve done the prep resources beforehand and you’re sending somebody who knows the project story to be with the photographer.
(52:01) It’s not that you need to babysit the photographer and be looking over their shoulder, but it can be good to have those in-person conversations about the goal of here’s what we need from the photos, here’s what we’re looking to do, and here’s the story of the project. And the point of this document is both for your photographer to reference, but mainly it’s for you to go through and force yourself to sit down and actually answer these questions and think through what were the important aspects of the project. Unless you’re actually forced to take the time to sit and think for a
(52:25) second about what actually was important to the homeowner, you’re going to miss things and your photographer is going to miss things. But it’s not the photographer’s fault. It’s the fact that they were missing information. So honestly, along with staging, this might be one of the most important pieces in this whole video.
(52:43) The people that are going to get the best photos are the people that are going to take the time up front to plan out what photos they need and really give all that information over to their photographer. That kind of stuff can make the photographer shoot differently than they would if they didn’t have that context. It can make them think differently about what kind of photos they need to tell that story.
(53:02) What should photos cost? How do I budget? Yeah, so typically a real estate photographer will do them based on the shoot. Sometimes I’ve also seen based on the square footage of the house, but you’re looking typically around $200 to $500, whereas a higherend architectural or interior design photographer is going to be about 1,000 to 3,000 for a day rate.
(53:19) One of the things to check on with this is making sure that you have the license to use the photos however you want. There are some cases in which you only get a single use. There are some where you can use them forever, but it’s an additional cost. It’s something to confirm with your photographer before you book the shoot. How long does a typical photo shoot take? Yeah.
(53:36) Um, depending on your photographer, it can take anywhere from two hours to a full day shoot. Um, the main differences here is if you’re booking somebody cheaper, it will be a faster shoot. I would still say account for like 2 to three hours for it. Um, but if you’re going through, especially if you’re doing a whole home, that is typically going to be a full day shoot.
(53:55) And the reason for that is twofold. One, they slow down to make sure that they get all the details exactly correct in the space before they shoot the photo. And the other is just purely based on the lighting. If you shoot the same exact space with the same exact photographer, morning, noon, and night, you’ll have three very different photos.
(54:13) And depending on the space, it might very well be that the photo that looks awful during morning time looks amazing at evening just based on where the sun’s at. So I think especially for custom home builders where there is no family immediately trying to move back in or living in the space, definitely go the full day shoot route.
(54:31) What are the most common mistakes I should avoid when hiring a photographer? [music] Yeah, there’s uh a few big ones. So the first one is just half investing in those cheap photographers, the people that you think you’re going to make. save some money by investing in them, but ultimately what happens is they aren’t photos that are useful or you have a use case later on in your marketing that you aren’t able to take advantage of and you pay for that cost later on by having less efficient marketing overall. I would say the second is when hiring a photographer,
(54:58) you’re not going through and checking what their body of work looks like. Are they mostly a residential interior photographer or are they mostly a commercial shooter? Are they mostly a wedding photographer? From what I’ve seen, that will oftentimes really bleed into their interior photography work.
(55:16) And if they have examples of interior photography, I would take a closer look and see, yes, this is residential work, but does it still look commercial, if you understand what I’m saying? Number three, um assuming that the photographer will do staging, set dressing, or really just not prioritizing at all. Uh this is a massive difference to your photos.
(55:36) you really can’t show off the full beauty of the work if you have a bunch of junk all in it or stuff that really doesn’t add to the story. And the last big mistake is just giving your your photographer either no direction or too vague of direction. Asking for close-ups of a space and then what you ultimately end up is getting close-ups of a ping-pong table that you didn’t build and you didn’t sell.
(55:54) It’s not that these photographers are dumb. It’s that most of them do not work with builders and are not used to that mindset of thinking about what are you wanting the photos for? How are you going to utilize them? Do I need a professional photographer? We’ve had people say like, “Hey, I have a guy at my church who’s offered to do them or my son or you know, our cousin is interested in photography and they kind of shoot some photos every now and then.
(56:18) ” I would say yes, you need a professional to do it. There’s probably a lot more that goes into photography than immediately is apparent to you. For example, here’s a quick list of the things that I do with photography that you don’t need to know, but it’s important for you to know that you don’t know them. Deciding between an HDR shoot or a flamant shoot. Knowing how to edit an HDR shoot versus a flamant shoot.
(56:38) Balancing the color of the photos and masking out and distracting objects without removing important details. Cropping the photo and aligning your verticals and horizontals to make sure that everything in the photo is perfectly plum and perfectly level. As well as all that, a stylistic coloring of the photo to match the feeling of the space.
(56:57) photographers who are very good at photography make it look natural and so then it can seem as if it’s very easy to do and anybody with an expensive camera can get it done. It’s just not the case. That’s why I would invest in a professional photographer who knows what they’re doing. If you don’t have the odd option and in your area the best you can do is a lower-end real estate photographer or one of your friends who has a small photography business.
(57:16) No matter who it is, the first thing I would do is going through and checking their portfolio of work. If you’re interested in going those other ways, I would want to make sure no matter who it is, they have a proven gallery of work showing that they can do the type of projects that you’re looking to have them shoot.
(57:32) At the very least, you need to understand that by giving these photographers a chance, you might be losing the chance to capture some of your best work and share that with homeowners for years to come. [music] But do I need professional before and during photos? No. I would say typically not.
(57:49) Now, what you do want to do is make sure when you’re at those early stages of the project, you are taking photography all throughout. Um, especially those before photos, grabbing wide angles that you can later match, going through and thinking about like even if it’s a space where you’re taking a wall out. Um, thinking about like, okay, in the future, this whole room is going to be this room plus this room, so I need to take a photo here.
(58:07) So, that way in the after, you can then match that angle and get a better visual. But no, I don’t think you need those photos to be nearly as professional. And sometimes it’s even worse, I think, when you have very professional looking befores because then people can confuse them with the afters.
(58:26) If you’d like a photographer to come in and take some of the befores, I that’s when I would use those cheaper real estate photographers, maybe somebody on Fiverr, something like that, where you can get somebody just to come in, they have a tripod, they have the nice camera, it’ll be good resolution, and they can just come through and snap those photos. What’s the difference between a [music] real estate and interior design photographer? While real estate photographers obviously work with realtors, they’re much cheaper, they have faster shoots, and they rely on quick, high volume work. Their goal is to maximize the space and make it often look light and bright. The downside of this is that
(58:55) they don’t focus on close-ups of the space, and their photos often look heavily edited. On the contrary, your interior design or architectural photographers will often do a full day shoot of the space serving interior designers or architects. Typically, they’ll have a day rate of about $1,000 to $3,000.
(59:13) And their goal is to capture the beauty of the space. Sometimes people will describe these as dark and moody photos, but they are edited to look far more natural than what you’ll typically find with a real estate photographer. There’s a whole section in the video where we go into more detail on this, so you can head back to that if you want some more information.
(59:32) Should I ask for raw files? Um, so a lot of times photographers will be unwilling to give raw files for their photos for a few reasons. I think the most common reason is they don’t want you misrepresenting their work, saying like, “Hey, this was shot by this person and then do the editing yourself.
(59:49) It would almost be like if the homeowner went and did additional renovations on the kitchen afterwards and then they’re telling people that you did it.” It’s essentially the same thing. Now, typically people want the raw files for a few reasons. one, you’re looking for more photos that the photographer might have cut out, and that’s just not typically what happens.
(1:00:07) Usually, they are giving you the vast majority, if not all the photos, um, and definitely giving you the best ones. I would say in this scenario, really moving forward, what just needs to happen is a better shot list to make sure you’re getting the important things that you need. And two, you don’t like the editing and you think maybe you can salvage them.
(1:00:26) Uh, we had one client who thought like the more naturallooking photos from the architectural or interior design photographers were essentially less edited. It’s not actually the case. Sometimes even more edited than the real estate ones. I would say often more edited, but they’re done in a way that you can’t tell the edit. So, if you’re just looking for that, you you don’t need the raw files. You need a different type of editing.
(1:00:46) Um, you can show examples of those photos to your photographer, but sometimes that’s just not the style they do. that’s not a style they’re comfortable with. It’s a different skill set and it might be time to look for a new photographer. Can I just edit my photos with AI? It’s a good question, especially as AI is getting better and better.
(1:01:05) Um, I think the answer is, can you convincingly do it without raising red flags for people? Possibly. There are routes you can go down where you can virtually stage a space, but as time goes on, I think I would recommend that less and less.
(1:01:24) I think as soon as people start to have any sort of doubt that this photo is not real, you’re going to lose credibility with your audience. And you have to weigh, is the amount that you’re going to save on not getting a professional photographer for this worth the amount of trust that you could potentially lose with your prospects. Something to think about.
(1:01:43) And then the last question that you’re going to have is, what do I do with these photos now? How do I make sure I’m getting the most ROI out of them? How do I make sure that I’m utilizing them and telling that story in the best way possible? And for that I would refer you to this video where we go over that in much more detail.