Estate agent interiors

Over the last couple of weeks I've spent many, many, many hours along at a friend's holiday home, taking pictures of the interiors for her estate agent's web site. I've occasionally tried doing interior photos of my own house without much success, so when I was asked to photograph the holiday home I wasn't confident that I'd produce anything decent. Rather than turn away work I decided to do the job and take as long as necessary, but only charge a fair rate of one-hour per finished photo.

The first time I went along there, I spent a couple of hours photographing the living room and then maybe half an hour in each of the other rooms. Came home, looked at the photos on the computer, and they were dreadful. The rooms looked cold and uninviting. I showed them to a friend who does a lot of architectural photos and he cut straight to the heart of the problem: The photos shouldn't just show the rooms, they should sell them to potential occupants. I'd been obsessing over angles and 'correct' exposures, and trying to show the entire room.

(Classic rookie mistake: "I've got a wide lens, I'll shoot wide!" Duh. Yes the photos needed a wide lens, but they needed to be wide for a reason, not just to crowbar everything into the frame.)

When I went back later that afternoon I concentrated on doing just the living room, and I took my laptop with me so I could check the pictures at a decent size and fine-tune them. I also lit the photos, using a combination of ambient and off-camera flash. After another couple of hours, here's what I came up with to show the living room. Notice that there's a flash behind the television to create a focal point. I also had another flash up high to right of frame, putting some trim around the edges of the grey furniture, to give them some separation.

With hindsight I can see that the living room photo could be improved, but I was very happy with it at the time. And despite the faults that I can see now, I still think I did a good job.

Next up was the kitchen. The mistake I originally made with the kitchen was trying to show too much of it. It's quite a large and spacious kitchen with a fireplace and lots of work surfaces, so I thought it was important to show those features as a selling point. But eventually I decided to just show the "living" part of the kitchen: The breakfast bar with a sea view, and the hob/oven. To keep the image very clean I cleared everything off the surfaces apart from a kettle on the hob and a vase of flowers that I borrowed from a neighbour. In the end I thought that even the flowers were too much so I did the picture with just the kettle. There was one flash to left of frame lighting the whole room, and another flash under the breakfast bar to lift the shadows that otherwise made the room appear too cold.

And then the bedroom. I have never enjoyed doing a photo LESS than doing this bedroom! I must have stopped half a dozen times and said to myself, out loud: "Andy, you do NOT know how to do this." Everything I tried looked awful. Several times I nearly gave up and walked away.

Well to cut a long story short, I eventually realised that I'd been making exactly the same mistake that I originally made with the kitchen: Trying to show the whole room. That was producing photos with a lot of floor (ie: dead space) and the end of the bed filling the middle of the frame. By simply moving over to near the bed and forgetting about 1/4 of the room that was just door and floor, I was able to quickly find an attractive angle. Took about an hour to light it properly, using one flash behind me to flood the room and another flash behind the bedside table to create a focal point. The picture hanging on the wall had a lot of reflections from the window and the lights so I photographed and processed it separately, then superimposed it. I removed the dark bed sheets and left just the white pillows and duvet to keep everything bright and breezy.

And finally we needed an exterior shot. During several visits to the house I tried various 'clever' ideas, none of which worked, and before I knew it I was two hours away from having to hand over the finished photos and I didn't have a decent exterior. In desperation I ended up looking back through a set of test shots I'd done weeks earlier and one shot jumped out at me, so I processed that and I think it's about the best I could hope for.

So now Eastlea Cottage in the Seaboard Villages on the north-east coast of Scotland has a nice set of professional photos on its web site.

And despite the fact that I didn't enjoy doing this job at all, at least I now know that I can do good interior photos so that's another box ticked and another client base that I can accept work from. It would be great if every job could be easy and fun, but the reality, for me, is that photography is work, not a hobby, and I don't like saying no to work, even the really difficult jobs!