5 Tips for Shooting Photos of Interiors

Whether you’re a real estate agent, a home contractor, an interior designer, or showcasing homes, offices, stores, or other spaces for another reason, having a few photography tips up your sleeve can go a long way in helping you shoot photos of interiors that’ll capture the attention of potential customers. We asked professional photographer and videographer Jennifer Arnett to share some tips with us on shooting great interiors.

Jennifer has been shooting photographs for businesses since 2005 and specializes in photographing buildings and homes. Before she opened her business, she was a webmaster for one of the largest automotive dealerships in the country and tells us, “while I worked at the car dealership, I learned a lot about photography and videography from the in-house marketing department that handled the print ads and TV commercials.”

Check out Jennifer’s work in the video below, and read on for her 5 tips for shooting interiors.

1. Use a tripod – When shooting an interior space, Jennifer recommends using a tripod and making sure that your camera is level so that the vertical lines of the room are straight. Doing this will help you keep the camera steady, especially if you are shooting video clips.
2. Don’t shoot too wide – Shooting too wide can cause the objects in the room to look distorted. “Compositions just look better when they are tighter,” she says.
3. Expose for the brightest objects in the room – This is in order to ensure that bright objects in a room, like lights and windows, don’t look blown out in your final image. If you are shooting images on a smartphone, you can adjust exposure by tapping in different areas of the screen.
4. Use an off-camera flash – If the room you are shooting in is low on natural light, Jennifer suggests using an off-camera flash, bounced off the wall-wall-ceiling joint to light the room. “Watch that there are no shadows or reflections caused by the flash,” she says. “To avoid reflections, take a shot with no flash and one with flash. You can mask out the areas where flash reflections show up.” If you don’t have an off-camera flash, use a lamp or other light source to add light to your scene.
5. White balance your images – White balance can help you achieve natural color in your images that is as close as possible to the actual color in the room you’re shooting in. If you are familiar with photo editing tools, Jennifer suggests using the Lightroom eye-dropper tool on the white ceiling but adds that “you might want to use a gray card for white balancing for extremely dark walls or rooms where the ceiling isn’t white.” Many mobile photo editing tools, such as iPhoto for iOS, also include simple white balancing tools that can be applied to your images after you shoot them.

Have you created an Animoto video featuring photographs of interiors? We’d love to see it. Leave a link in the comments below.

Are you new to Animoto? Find out how it works and sign up here.