the bad and the ugly

Right now I am fully immersed in the house-selling and house-buying process and when I think of things to blog about, all I can think about is how hard it is to nicely photograph a home for sale. I have seen it all - good, bad, and ugly. The photos we posted when our apartment was listed were somewhere in the middle - certainly not award-winning but hopefully not distractingly bad. Here are some that are, in fact, distractingly bad.

Usually it's a problem of having too much stuff. Furniture can be hard to move for a photo but a miscellaneous empty fish tank and a plant? Also, please don't use flash. Find a way to use natural lighting.

Here we have a situation where the sellers were very good about removing a lot of their stuff. And they used natural lighting. However, all I see in this photo is the place where they stored all their junk piles so the pictures would look uncluttered. Oh wait.

And, if at all possible, please don't zoom in to show close-ups. Do I need to see the ceiling here? No. If you could show the whole room I bet I would understand that there is natural light coming from skylights.

These are all from houses we looked at - online or in person. It's amazing what an effect photos can have on a buyer's perception of a home. Sometimes we found places that were so well staged and photographed that they were disappointing in person. I will follow up shortly with beautiful photographs so you can scrub these out of your mind.

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