The camera never lies … much

After the decluttering comes the photographs, as the real estate agent gets all the advertising stuff ready for my place to go on the market. He sent a professional photographer around, and the results were quite striking. I had taken a few quick shots as I decluttered, for my own personal records, and I knew that they weren’t great photos because I was using the little camera, its wide angle setting isn’t really very wide, and I didn’t take a great deal of care over composition or lighting.

My shots are in stark contrast to the results of the photographer’s time in my place. He really knew what he was doing, but there are also some interesting consequences of the way he and photography worked. He had a good camera with a wide angle lens, together with post-production software to reduce the curved distortion typical of such lenses. The wider angle shots capture more of the room but also have the added marketing bonus of making the rooms seem bigger. In addition, he took multiple shots in different lighting conditions, and then combined these digitally to create a single shot in which all parts of the shot were lit to best advantage (e.g., nice glowing floorboards, but also even lighting on the walls and furniture). There were also a few odd bits of remaining clutter that were removed out of the line of sight for some of the shots.

Of course the camera lies.

Below are two sets of contrasts, with my earlier snaps (before I’d finished the decluttering) on the left and the photographer’s efforts on the right … as if you can’t tell whose is whose!

I should point out that he didn’t take any photos of the garage. In some respects this is hardly surprising. For starters, where do you think all the clutter went? For seconds, garages aren’t photogenic at the best of times, even without clutter, and so hardly anybody has garage photos in their real estate advertisements … which is ironic, because it was the photo of the garage that just about sold me on the place I bought in Hobart!