Six Things I Fix in Every Listing Shoot (Three of Them You Can Fix Before I Get There)
Every house is different. The problems are not.
I shot a 1918 house in Riverside last week — mosaic tile floors, stained glass, barrel-vault ceilings upstairs. Nothing about it resembles the 1985 condo I shot in Schaumburg or the land parcel I flew a drone over in Arlington Heights. But the same six things came up, the way they come up on every shoot.
Three of them are my job. Three take an agent about five minutes, and they're the difference between a good frame and a wasted one.
LEAN THE CAMERA AND THE WALLS LEAN TOO
This is the one that gives a listing away instantly.
A phone held at chest height and tipped slightly up or down bends every vertical line in the room. Door frames narrow toward the ceiling. Walls fall inward. A buyer can't name what's wrong, but the room reads smaller and cheaper than it is.
The fix isn't a filter. It's a tripod at a fixed height with the camera level, and then a correction pass in Lightroom for whatever the lens still bends. Shot that way, the room keeps its actual proportions — which, when a seller is paying for square footage, is the entire point.
ONE COLOR OF LIGHT PER ROOM
Walk into any bathroom at 2pm and you have three light sources fighting each other: daylight coming through the window, warm bulbs overhead, and a color cast bouncing off whatever's on the walls.
Your eye corrects for this automatically. A camera does not. You get a photo where one half of the room is orange, the other half is blue, and the whole thing looks like it was shot on a flip phone.
I bracket exposures and blend them by hand, then correct to a single white balance. Pick one color of light, make everything match it. Nobody notices when it's right.
NEVER BLOW OUT THE WINDOWS
A white rectangle where a window should be tells a buyer nothing.
This is the most common failure in MLS photos and it comes from exposing for the room and letting the window go. In a village like Riverside, where half the value is the old trees and the street, that's throwing away the reason someone would buy the house.
Bracketed exposures, blended by hand. You keep the room and you keep the view.
Those three are mine. Here are the three that are yours.
TURN THE TV OFF
A black screen is furniture. A screen frozen mid-show is a timestamp on the listing and a magnet for every eye that lands on the photo.
It takes four seconds and it's the single easiest win on this list.
MOVE THE CARS
Yours, the seller's, the neighbor's if you can manage it.
The driveway is a selling feature. A parked car hides it, dates the photo, and puts a license plate in a frame that's about to live on the internet. This is the thing that most often costs a good exterior — I can reschedule the interior, I can't reshoot the front of the house at golden hour because someone parked in it.
If the sellers are home, ask them to pull out before I arrive. That's it.
LIDS DOWN, BINS GONE
Toilet seats closed. Bathroom bins out of the frame. Counters cleared of toothbrushes, soap bottles, and mail.
None of this is a deep clean. It's a five-minute pass through the house with a laundry basket. Nobody notices when it's done. Everybody notices when it isn't.
WHAT THIS ACTUALLY CHANGES
None of these six things is dramatic on its own. Together they're the whole difference between photos that look like a professional shot them and photos that look like a phone did.
The three on my list are why you hire someone. The three on yours are free.
FAQ
How fast do you deliver photos and video? Standard turnaround is 24 hours for photos and within 48 hours for video.
Do you shoot houses that aren't staged? Yes. Most of what I shoot is vacant or lived-in. Staging helps, but the six things above matter more than furniture does.
What if the sellers can't move the cars? I'll work around it — shoot from an angle that hides the driveway, or come back for the exterior. It just costs time, and time is the one thing a listing photographer doesn't have much of on shoot day.
Do you serve my town? Ogi Optics covers Chicagoland out of Mount Prospect — the northwest suburbs, the city, and into Wisconsin for the right project.