Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 20th March 2008
Turning photographs into leads
If you’re selling a dream, you need great images. A beautiful photograph can make the difference between persuading a web visitor to make an enquiry, or having them click away to the competition. Sharp, crisp visuals are essential for lead generation. The right images of competitively priced properties, shown on a clean and professional website, will generate leads. It’s as simple as that.
Even if you rely on the marketing images provided by property developers, there are things you can do to improve your photographs. We recruited the help of estate agent turned professional photographer John Durrant to give us some hints and tips.
- Cheat. You can correct and enhance images using a program like Photoshop. Adding blue sky or making countryside greener can really make a difference to the ambience of an external shot. It can also be used to correct interior images by straightening sloping or converging walls. For those who don’t have Photoshop or don’t want to buy it (it’s $650, around £325), John offers a photoshopping service that starts at £1.75 a photo.
- Make sure the sun is behind you. If you are visiting a property to take photographs, have a look at Google Maps before you go so you can time your visit appropriately. Enter the postcode of the property and the map centres north. The sun rises in the East, on the right of the screen, and in the northern hemisphere moves in an arc across the bottom of the screen from right to left. You can use this information to estimate the best time to take your photograph.
- Shoot low when you're shooting interiors. Look at any professionally photographed interiors, in magazines or in up-market agents' brochures, and you'll hardly ever see an interior that is taken from a position that is any higher than midway between the floor and the ceiling. There are all sorts of reasons for this, mostly to do with lens distortion and the desire to make a room look natural and a good size. Compare professionally taken images with those that look like they've been made with a CCTV camera and ask yourself which look better - those shot from a low level or those that appear to have been taken with the camera held above the photographers' heads.
- Buy an SLR with a wide angle lens. Even with a wide-angle lens on a snapshot camera you won’t get as much into the picture as you will with a 10mm lens on an SLR. It’s particularly useful for creating an illusion of space when shooting interior shots in small spaces. John recommends the Canon 400D (around £370) with a Sigma 10mm to 20mm lens (around £280).
- Never use on-camera flash. Some rooms don’t get much natural light and require the use of flash photography. The results you get with an inbuilt flash on a compact camera won’t be great as your photos will often have a nasty shadow cast over the bottom of them. Instead, John recommends using a bounce flash, from a flashgun that attaches to your camera's hot shoe. The light you'll get from one of these, when it's bounced off a white ceiling, will fill in the dark shadows in a room and look much more natural than the very harsh light that your camera's own flash will create.
John Durrant operated as a UK estate agent for 37 years and is now a professional property photographer and marketeer.