When you’re selling houses or advertising commercial properties to potential tenants, the imagery you use is critical to your success. The vast majority of people look at property listings online before contacting a realtor, which means that the online content you publish has to pique their interest.
Studies have shown that visual content, such as images and videos, is the first thing that users look at. What’s more – they’re also more likely to remember information that they’ve seen in visual content.
Before a potential buyer or tenant even reads the accompanying information, they’ll look at real estate photography and make an instant decision about the property. Due to this, it’s essential to use high-quality images when advertising residential and commercial real estate.
If you want to enhance your skills and ensure you’re using the best images, take a look at these top tips and start perfecting your architectural photography now:

1. Visit the Site More Than Once
As every photographer knows, environmental conditions have a major impact on photographs, so it’s vital to visit a site more than once if you want to capture the best images. A home can look startlingly different when it’s illuminated on a dark evening than it does in the morning sun, for example.
By making more than one visit to the site, you can determine how the environmental conditions affect the property and, therefore, when is the best time to photograph it. You may even want to capture images in a range of different conditions so that the property can be showcased at its finest.
2. Get a Bird’s Eye View
Most real estate agents and property owners use images that are taken from the ground level when advertising buildings, but why not do something different? When you use a drone for real estate photography, you can capture images from an entirely different perspective.
Not only will these images provide useful information to potential buyers or tenants, but they’ll also capture people’s attention as they scroll through endless property listings. As a result, you can rely on drone photography to increase the reach of property advertisements and, therefore, shorten the sales or letting cycle.
3. Identify a Purpose
Architectural photography can take many forms. An artistic image of a building can be used to highlight its character, while a black and white image can show the building in a more dramatic way. By identifying a purpose, you can ensure that your photographs meet the needs of the client, which is your top priority.
When you’re photographing real estate, for example, you’ll need to show the property at its best, capture its character but also convey practical information regarding the site and the structure. While these competing interests can be a challenge, keeping the client’s brief in mind will help you to balance the different elements that your photography needs to incorporate.
4. Pay Attention to Property Lines
When you’re photographing property, making sure that lines are where they are supposed to be can be one of the biggest obstacles you’ll face. While it sounds deceptively simple, ensuring that vertical lines appear vertical and horizontal lines appear horizontal is a lot more difficult than you’d expect!
When parallel lines merge into one another or your position means that the lines aren’t reflected appropriately, you’ll need to change your setup. Switching to a tilt-shift lens, moving backwards, or increasing your height can all be viable ways to ensure the lines of a property appear as they should.
5. Use Additional Lighting for Interiors
When you’re taking capturing images of the interior of a property, be sure to take additional lighting with you. Small windows or overcast weather can make it difficult for natural light to reach every aspect of the room and standard lighting rarely works well once images have been processed.
Even if you don’t have industry-grade lighting available, there are a variety of compact, professional lighting rigs on the market. By investing in a portable lighting setup, you can reduce the time it takes to photograph real estate and drastically improve the quality of your images.
Expanding Your Skillset as an Architectural Photographer
No matter how experienced you are, it’s important to continually enhance your skills. If you want to perfect your architectural photography, use your spare time to capture images of buildings and structures to vary your abilities and optimize the outcome. Even taking snaps of your own home’s interior can be an effective way to broaden your skillset.
By dedicating your time to enhancing your skills, you’ll be able to create stunning architectural images and increase your profile as a talented architectural photographer.
