A little staging can go a really long way to create beautiful pictures for a real estate listing. Take this two-bedroom townhouse. Unstaged, it might look small, confined, and uninviting. But with some nice staging and a little help with lighting to make is bright and vibrant, this little condo in Green Valley looks like a perfect place for a young couple or a starter home for a new family.
We always love to shoot beautiful spaces. Woodside Homes recently gave us a call to photograph the models homes of two newly opened communities in Henderson. The photography for San Remo Townhomes and Alta Fiore at Lake Las Vegas allowed us to create images of some beautifully designed interiors and create real estate images which are more work-intensive, and in the end, a little more crafted than our more affordable real estate photography offerings.
While it seems counterintuitive, shooting during the day is typically much more work than shooting in the evening. There’s no brighter light to compete with than the sun and when sunlight comes pouring through windows with no window coverings (as is typical with model homes) you need to match that brightness with flash lighting inside to keep the windows balanced. What’s more, builders want to showcase their interior lighting–light which doesn’t match daylight. That means we need to find ways with lighting and post-processing to keep colors consistent and avoid blue and orange color casts which are the result of differing sources of light. To illustrate this point, we threw in an out-of-camera shot of one of these spaces which was shot in RAW and balanced as well as we could without supplemental lighting and compositing in post-production. It’s not bad, but it’s not the same.
Without getting too technical, the bottom line is that shooting during the day can pose some real obstacles to getting quality images. Here is a series of living room and kitchen combos, which tend to be the signature shot of these space. We hope you like what you see!
We have the regular opportunity to photography commercial shopping centers which are for sale. When shooting, we don’t have the luxury of a controlled environment, with shoppers, cars, weather, and all the complications of shooting during business hours. Nonetheless, we often have the task of creating professional images in this less-than-professional environment. In addition, we get requests to feature the setting of the shopping center, such as being adjacent to the strip or having views of the valley. At Lake Mead Crossing, the setting included the dramatic desert mountains surrounding the complex. With large, big-box retail buildings, seeing surrounding landscape can be a challenge–after all, the mountains, though large, are 20 miles away. So while we provided strong wide-angle images of the major retailers at the property and its luscious landscaping, we walked backwards and pulled out a longer lens to allow the desert mountains to peek over the buildings and add context to the images. Shooting in both daylight and at the beautiful twilight hour, we were able to provide the agency’s designers a variety of images for their sales materials for the property. Producing a diverse set of clean, beautiful and authentic visuals for our clients is not only one of our biggest goals, it’s creatively challenging, and a lot of fun.
It’s great to be part of the sale of a beautiful home. We work with a lot of great agents that take pride in the work they do–both listing and showing homes for sale. A good agent does a lot to close a sale–from the hard work of marketing, to dealing personalities (not always charismatic ones), to piles of paperwork, and in the end, doing whatever it takes to make something happen. And now with so much of the process of buying and selling properties taking place online (especially viewing properties before you visit them), the agent needs to provide online listings which capture attention and get people in the door. Great photography is the starting point in this process. Having gone from a luxury to a necessity, the photographs you have online are the single biggest draw you have for a property.
Every home has a visual selling point, that a good photographer will try to capture and encapsulate in a single image. Take a look at some recent photos we took of a beautiful home in Green Valley. Using the backyard foliage to frame the foreground in the above photo, we created a scene which emphasized the mood that the lush landscaping gives to the backyard. Paired with crisp, solid images of the well-maintained house, this listing will stand apart from its peers.
Whether you need to make a property look better that it does in person, or whether you need to make sure it shines in photos like it does in real life, professional photography makes all the difference when selling a home.
Even though the glamorous and gorgeous spaces we often get to shoot are wonderful to be able to share here, it seems important to show that professional photography can help out every kind of space–rich ones and modest ones alike. Here are some photos of an Airbnb rental near the Las Vegas strip, which for those who know the area, understand that the glamor of Las Vegas ends immediately as you depart Las Vegas Boulevard. Exactly one block to the west lies this modest condominium complex that a property owner needed some great shots for. The spaces are modest, but remodeled with care, and ready for guests from around the world. We hope you like seeing a few clean, beautiful photos of an owner’s hard work.
Our daily rate worked great when Colliers recently needed photography of three large commercial buildings in Henderson. They wanted to capture what the spaces looked like in broad daylight, but also hoped to capture some moodier twilight shots where the colors are more dramatic and the deep blues of the evening sky add saturation and drama to the photos. The challenge in taking pictures of a large commercial building is in capturing the space as a whole while still representing features and lending interest to the image. After all, these are large, monolithic edifices meant for producing, packaging, and shipping product, not dressing up for a glamor shot. But immensity has its upsides. We tried to focus on the symmetry of garage doors, the vast entangled lines of the warehouse, ceiling, the vanishing contours of the building into the horizon, a touch of desert hills in the distance, and the end result is, well, pretty glamorous. We work with what we’re given, right?
We had the pleasure of shooting some commercial real estate to kick off 2016. At the corner of Green Valley and Sunset (the heart of Green Valley), we spent New Years Day taking advantage of the lack of auto and pedestrian traffic to get some great twilight shots of the shopping center on the Southeast corner. The local Trader Joes and Big 5 keep the complex pretty busy on normal days, so it was a real treat to have the place (mostly) to ourselves.
Getting great photos of commercial real estate involves picking the best time of day and typically adding some supplemental lighting to the building exteriors, which frequently suffer from insufficient or unflattering lighting.
Commercial real estate photography is something we do produce on a regular basis! Feel free to contact us to learn more about what we do to create stunning images of your commercial space!
When we received a call to shoot at the Westin Lake Las Vegas, time and scheduling only permitted shooting on one day. A sprawling resort, the Westin sits beside the Lake and a golf course and itself boasts multiple pools, waterslide, fountains, two restaurants, a spa, and, of course, guestrooms. The shot list was large, so to capture the stunning twilight hour twice in one day, we arrived before 5:00AM and got to shooting. We wrapped things up around 10:00PM and came away with some beautiful images.
