What is it that makes photography of luxury real estate different?
Having spent many years taking photographs of real estate all over Southern California, I can say that the role of the photographer changes when you get into a luxury property. With an ordinary listing, photography has a rather simple aim: to clearly show the house, explain its layout, make the various rooms easy to understand, and provide buyers with enough information so that they can decide whether or not they want to see the property in person.
Until you enter an 8,000-square-foot house in Beverly Hills or a modern home situated overlooking Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills, it's not sufficient just to show the space. The buyer will already be aware of the square footage, the number of bedrooms, the facilities, and in many cases the main finishes before they have even reached the middle of the gallery. It is the photography that has to convey all the aspects which the figures fail to do: the sensation of sitting in the living room, the way the afternoon light plays with the architecture, the view from the couch, and the reason why this particular property differs from the other multi-million-dollar ones the buyer is looking at.
It is at this point that luxury real estate photography begins to shift from being about documenting space to being about conveying a way of life.
Three Identical Homes Can Be Presented Three Completely Different Ways
Picture three brand-new houses of the same design in the Hollywood Hills, all being put up for sale at about the same time—they have the same architecture, similar vistas, comparable interior finishes, and identical asking prices.
The first agent employs a photographer who visits for a short shooting session, takes three HDR bracket shots of each room, shoots everything at an extremely wide angle, carries out a simple edit, and then provides 30 well-presented photographs. The photographs aren't necessarily of poor quality; they carry out their function and give the buyers an idea of what the house looks like.
The second photographer takes longer. He or she takes five brackets, carries out more sophisticated colour correction, pays greater attention to the exposure through the windows, and ends up with a noticeably more refined gallery.
There is also a third method. Prior to beginning to take the photographs, I would like to find out what is actually important regarding the property. Does the view of Downtown Los Angeles constitute the main feature of the living room? Is there any custom woodwork that has to keep its natural colour and texture? Would a small amount of shadow add more depth to the room? Is it actually the widest possible photograph that makes the best composition?
The reasons for those decisions are more related to an understanding of what we are trying to sell than to the equipment.
Once Buyers Know the House Is Big, Stop Trying to Prove It
Wide-angle lenses are essential for real estate photography and I make frequent use of them. Since buyers need photos which show how the rooms link together and enable them to get a true idea of the property, it is a mistake to think that a photograph improves just because the room looks as large as possible.
Anyone who is thinking of buying an 8,000-square-foot house in Beverly Hills clearly realizes how large it is, so I don't require 70 photos to keep showing that fact.
After I have taken the broad, introductory shots, I can adjust the lens. Rather than taking photographs of everything at 16mm, I could change to 20mm or 24mm and begin to focus on the individual experiences inside the home.
Picture a couch placed next to floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of Los Angeles. I could stand in the corner and take a photograph of the whole living room, or I could move nearer and arrange a composition featuring the couch and the view. At the moment I want people to imagine themselves sitting there on a Sunday afternoon, enjoying a game of football with friends and at the same time looking out over the city.
The first photograph is about selling space while the second is about selling a way of life.
A fully luxurious gallery must have both.
Luxury Photography Often Sits Between Real Estate, Architecture and Interior Design
The further up you go in the market, the more significant individual details become. Things such as custom glass, stone, cabinetry, woodwork, lighting, flooring, furniture and appliances can amount to huge investments. However, if each photograph is an ultra-wide establishing shot, those details then appear as small elements within a much larger frame.
Which is why I believe that the best luxury property photography should draw on a number of different fields. Traditional real estate photographs are still necessary since buyers need to understand the home, but architectural compositions can be used to illustrate the design and interior-style photographs can be used to emphasize the materials and individual experiences.
A photograph sometimes doesn't contain the greatest amount of information; it merely contains the correct information.
This has an effect on the way I consider lighting. It is true that real estate photography has a reputation for showing interiors that are very bright, but that doesn't mean that the brighter the better. Real rooms have shadows, and these shadows are what give things their shape and depth. When all the dark areas are aggressively brightened during editing, an expensive interior may start to look rather flat.
I employ either HDR or flash according to the requirements of the property. It doesn't always aim to brighten a room; at times I use additional lighting to ensure correct colour and texture and then combine it with the exposures taken with natural light so that natural shadows appear in the final photograph. Ideally, anyone viewing the image should not be aware of whether I have used flash or HDR; they should just be looking at the house.
Twilight Is About the Moment, Not Just the Sky
It is in the field of twilight photography that this approach becomes particularly clear. Suppose you are taking photographs of a property with an ocean view at the time the sun is setting; if I expose mainly for the interior, the sunset outside will be lost. If the exposure is made for the sky, the room will end up being too dark. If you then overexpose both areas too strongly, the image begins to take on that exaggerated HDR look which is not appropriate for a luxury property.
Rather, I would like have sufficient control over the interior lighting so that the exterior appears naturally lit. I want the house to stay warm and welcoming without it looking as if it has been artificially illuminated, and I want the sunset to appear as the one that really did take place.
The aim goes beyond merely producing a dramatic sky; it is to explain why it is special to be inside that house at that particular time of day.
One Beverly Hills Shoot Changed the Way I Look at Luxury Listings
There was a property in Beverly Hills that helped to reinforce this method for me. Although the house had wonderful details and spectacular views, the original scope required a more basic photography package. After I had seen the property I decided that I wouldn't want to take its photographs in the usual way as a standard listing.
I decided to put a lot more effort into the shoot without raising the client's price since I regarded it as one that could become an important portfolio project for us. For the photography and the drone coverage, we provided about 120 images.
It was not the number of photographs that was important; what was important was having sufficient creative space so as not to treat each image as just another wide-format listing photograph.
We could first set out the architectural arrangement and then proceed further. Using shorter focal lengths, we could take photographs showing the relationship between the furniture and the views, and note how the materials reacted to light. In some places the ceiling lights produced strong colour casts on the furniture. Once a couch and the view behind it became the subject of a composition, it suddenly became very important to get the colour right.
It was at that point that the type of photography involved became a mix of real estate, architectural, and interior photography. That is precisely what was required for that property.
AI Makes Getting the Photograph Right More Important
It is now extremely easy to edit photographs after taking them with the help of generative AI; you can choose an object, get it removed in a matter of seconds, and the software will then produce something that it believes should be behind the object.
That ability is impressive, but real estate photography does present an important problem in that the software does not know which details belong to the actual property.
When an image is altered, the AI can produce a part of the wall, the flooring, the cabinetry, or some other architectural feature that originally wasn't there. From that point on, we're no longer just fixing a photograph but are instead creating a different version of the property.
What I prefer to do is to deal with as much as possible both before and while shooting; this involves properly preparing the location, managing the light, removing any distractions that are appropriate, and taking in sufficient information so that extensive generative editing later on is not needed. Although modern editing tools are useful, they should not take the place of good photography.
Luxury Real Estate Photography Should Sell the Experience
A buyer will not be looking at your listing on its own; instead, they look at it together with other properties that are in the same price range, usually within a matter of minutes of each other.
Return to the three identical houses in the Hollywood Hills. The listing for one of them may include photographs that clearly show all the rooms. In the case of another, the photographs will be technically excellent in terms of HDR. As for the third, it is able to describe the whole property while at the same time making the viewer imagine themselves entertaining friends from a vantage point over Los Angeles or watching the sunset from the living room.
The properties could be almost the same, but the online experience that buyers have with them isn't.
Photography by itself isn't enough to sell a home that is worth millions of dollars; pricing, location, architectural features, market conditions, the way the property is presented, and the agent's strategy all have a much greater influence. Yet it is photography that decides how a person first encounters many of those qualities.
That is why my aim in carrying out photography of luxury real estate isn't to make a house appear larger than it actually is, newer than it really is, or more expensive than it truly is; it is to discover what causes a person to want to live in it and then to photograph that in an honest way.
Once we've shown buyers how large the house is and how the rooms connect, the more interesting question begins: What would it actually feel like to call this place home?
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