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The 3L rule for photographing interiors and expanding your portfolio
Table of contents
How to photograph interiors in an innovative way and expand your market
If you are a young photographer and want to get your business off the ground, expand your market and your portfolio, and you need quality images, explore with me a small but useful frontier: real estate and interior furnishing. Follow me and I will show you how to capture interior images that will catalyze your clients' attention.
If you have ever browsed an interior design magazine and the images on small real estate agency websites before buying, renting or furnishing a home, then the 3L rules can be very useful to you.
Today, in this era made up mostly of images (see social media Facebook, Pinterest) everyone relies on photos from online magazines and real estate agency websites to help make such an important choice. Many people skip right over portals that don't provide beautiful, captivating images. I'm talking about those images that capture attention and stimulate the desire to have the photographed item right away, whether it be apartments or furnishings.
How can you combine your need to expand your portfolio with the need for captivating images?
While large companies can organize full-blown photo sets to best showcase their products thanks to high budgets, small artisans, as well as local real estate agencies, suffer from a lack of beautiful photos that fully show the value of their products, thus missing out on excellent sales opportunities.
And this is where you come in: you offer to give space to captivating images on their website and on their and your social channels.
What do you need to take captivating photos?
Panoramic shots, overall views and detail shots, photos that show the 'technical features' of each space and piece of furniture but also the emotional and warm side, to convey the idea of 'home'.
You can do all of this in just a few shots and in a few hours with the 3L rule:
- lens
- light
- level (height)
Lens. First of all, you will need to work on depth of field and colors to highlight details. Since the subjects are inanimate, hence not moving, a common 18-55 lens will do more than fine, and you can then help yourself with saturation through the camera settings and in post-production.
Light. You will then need to work on light and colors to give a sense of 'warmth'. The technique used by many professional photographers is lighting from three directions, but if you don't have 3 heavy lights, you can be helped in this phase by filters in post-production. To neutralize the color temperature typical of indoor photos, you need to adjust the white balance (WB) and at the same time it is recommended to apply an AMBER filter on the flash (TN-A1 and TN-A2).
Level (height). For overall shots the matter becomes more complex. You can't use a wide-angle lens, because although it captures wide spaces, it distorts angles and objects. Many real estate agency websites make this mistake, publishing photos that don't convey the proportions and the space at all. To get around this, you can shoot a sequence of images to post-process and stitch together with programs like hugin, using a vertical 24mm.
What is the added value for your professional photos?
If you want to give tangible added value to your work and to your client, a good and less rudimentary method is to shoot images from above, or in any case from heights above that of the human eye. Both the spaces and the furnishings can thus be well showcased. New research in materials and photography has led to recent innovations in equipment for shooting from above.
In this regard, I recommend trying the advantages offered by telescopic poles. In particular, the most innovative is the Magic Pole, a pole adjustable up to 5 meters, made of fiberglass rather than carbon fiber (therefore sturdy and very light compared to the others).
By showing an enclosed space from a height of 5 metres, you can easily show off and enhance the light and atmosphere, and give a general overview of possible colour and furniture combinations.
Thanks to your shots, the buyer can already start to 'daydream' about the home they see on a screen, and you already have your "passport" as an interior photographer for innovative photos.
Cheers to your next click!
ps: share on your favourite social networks and let your friends know about the 3L rule
