Real estate marketing is a visual arts business. Think about it: Buyers are scouring the web, looking for hours at a time at sites like REMAX.com, Realtor.com, Zillow.com, Redfin.com… and a bunch of others, hoping to be moved by photos and text about a home.
Sure, they’re shopping for homes in a certain location, a certain price range and number of bedrooms, usually.
But when there are 15 homes that fit their criteria, the photos of the particular homes are one of the first — and most important — differentiators. The photos — more than anything else – either succeed or fail in getting that buyer to take the next step and make an appointment to see the home.
That’s why I use HDR editing for all my real estate marketing photos. HDR is exclusive to digital, bracketed photography. It stands for High Dynamic Range, and the way it works is this:
- First, I compose the shot with my Canon Eos T2i mounted on a Manfrotto tripod.
- I then manually set the camera to take 3 bracketed exposures of the same shot. The first photo is properly exposed for the general light conditions in the space I’m shooting. This is where most would stop and move onto the next shot, but I have two more photos to take first…
- The second photo is of exactly the same subject, but this one is purposely under-exposed. By itself, it ends up quite dark, but is actually harvesting a few elements of the overall composition that we’ll want to use later.
- The third and final photo is over-exposed, and it looks really bright by itself. Again, though, there are elements of that shot, colors and such, that we will pull from later.
With those 3 shots of that one subject, I then upload them to a software program that combines, essentially, the “best” of each one into one super dynamic photograph. I’ll spend some time editing it further, tweaking any number of a few dozen different variables, until the light, shadow, color saturation and overall quality are just right.
One of the amazing benefits of this type of photography is that I can properly expose for a room’s interior, AND for the view out through a window. With just one image taken for the room’s light level, the view outside often looks like a nuclear explosion. That’s not how the eye would see it, and it leaves you wondering what’s outside.
Click on a few of the HDR photo thumbnails below, and tell me if you think HDR would help get your house more noticed by potential buyers.
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PS… I first learned about HDR photography from reading Teresa Boardman’s blog on St. Paul Real Estate.
