How do I photograph a room so it looks like an estate agent photo?

Property photographs succeed on three things people rarely think about: the camera is level, the room is empty of clutter, and the windows are not blown out. Everything else is a refinement.

What you'll need

• A tripod
• A wide-angle lens or the phone's ultrawide
• A spirit level, or the camera's electronic level

Step by step

1. Tidy ruthlessly first.Clear every worktop, remove bins, cables, mats, magnets from the fridge, toiletries, towels that are not for show, and anything on the floor. Rooms look larger when the floor and the horizontal surfaces are visible. This takes longer than the photography and matters more.
2. Keep the camera level.Any upward or downward tilt makes vertical lines converge, and a room with leaning walls looks amateur immediately. Use the electronic level, and if you need more ceiling in the frame, raise the whole camera rather than tilting it.
3. Set the height at around chest level.Roughly a metre to a metre and a quarter. Standing height looks down on the furniture and makes the room look smaller; very low looks theatrical. Chest height is the convention because it looks natural.
4. Shoot from a corner.Standing in or near a corner shows two walls and the diagonal of the room, which is the longest sight line available. Shooting square at one wall makes any room look like a corridor.
5. Do not over-wide the lens.An ultrawide distorts the room and stretches whatever is nearest the camera. Around 16 to 24mm equivalent is the useful range. Wider than that and buyers arrive at the viewing feeling misled, which is the outcome nobody wants.
6. Handle the window brightness.A window is many times brighter than the room. Either expose for the room and let the window go white, which is honest and standard, or take one exposure for the room and one for the window on a tripod and blend them so the view is visible.
7. Turn the lights off, or commit to them fully.Room lights are a different colour from daylight and produce mixed lighting that cannot be corrected in one go. Daylight only is cleaner and easier. If you want the warm-lamps look, shoot at dusk when the outside brightness has fallen to match.
8. Watch the edges and the reflections.Check the frame for your own reflection in a mirror, a window or a television, and for a door edge or a radiator cutting into the corner. A tripod lets you check the frame properly before shooting.
9. Correct the remaining distortion afterwards.Lens correction plus a vertical perspective correction fixes the small residual lean. Do it before cropping, because both operations trim the frame.
10. Shoot the room, not the objects.Buyers are assessing space, light and layout. Include the floor and the ceiling line, show where the doors and windows are, and take one photograph per room from the best corner rather than six from everywhere.

Tips

• Open internal doors and turn taps and handles so they read cleanly. Small alignments make a room look cared for.
• Photograph on a bright but overcast day. Direct sun through a window creates a hard bright patch that dominates the picture.
• Take a photograph, look at it on a screen, and go back and tidy what it reveals. The camera always finds more clutter than the eye does.

Common mistakes

• Tilting the camera up to fit the ceiling in — Converging verticals are the single most obvious sign of an amateur interior photograph. Raise the tripod instead, or step back, or correct it in software afterwards.
• Using the widest possible lens to make a room look big — It stretches the near corner, distorts furniture and misrepresents the space. Viewers recognise it and it damages trust in the whole listing.
• Leaving the ceiling lights on — Warm bulbs against cool daylight produce two colours in one photograph. No single white balance is correct for both and the result looks muddy.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask