By Meaghan Loraas, Content Marketing Manager, Virtuance

You’ve designed a beautiful kitchen and you’re ready to show off your work to other potential clients. Congratulations! But what’s the secret to creating professional images of your design? As a professional real estate photography service, Virtuance offers a few tips when staging a kitchen for either a professional photographer or for your own interior photo shoot.

1. Use Natural Light

Probably the most important tip for shooting an interior space: take advantage of natural light! Even the most picture-perfect kitchen can look shabby in photos if the lighting isn’t right. The general consensus for magazine-worthy interior photography is that you should shut off any artificial lights to create a natural feel to the space. 

An even light temperature results in better photos. When you leave interior lights on, the light fixtures can create strange shadows that will appear on walls, floors, and appliances. This will result in one of  two things: extensive editing time or distracting images. 

The only time you should use interior lights during a photo shoot is if you want to highlight a lighting feature, such as recessed lighting. In these cases, you’ll want to have a second exposure to soften the light.

2. Limit Your Wide Shots

When it comes to design photography, it can be easy to rely on wide shots of your design. That’s a lot of what you see with real estate photography, because its benefit is that it shows how big a space is. When you want to show off your design, however, you’ll want the details to be featured prominently, instead of lost in a wide shot.

For example, professional real estate photographers often shoot at 16mm for wide shots. For design and interior photography, you should stick with 24mm. Take this advice with a grain of salt, because the wide-angle lens you use (if you use one at all) often depends on the space.

3. Declutter

Make sure that the focus of your images is your beautiful design work instead of counter clutter! Clear the surfaces in the kitchen except for minimal styling objects. A well-composed shot will guide the eye to the area you want to highlight. When you’re setting up the kitchen for a photo shoot, ask yourself if there are items that distract from the features you want to show.

4. Details, Details, Details

Tips 3 and 4 go hand-in-hand. By decluttering your space, you leave room for the important details. The end-goal of your interior photo shoot is to produce eye-catching images to drum up more business and awareness for your brand. If you are working with a professional photographer, be sure to collaborate with them to ensure the specific design details you want featured are in composed shots.

5. Spend Time on Composition

Whether you are shooting the space yourself or working with a professional real estate photographer, you need to spend time on composing shots. That may mean that you need to remind yourselves of some basics: how to make use of negative space, color balances and leading lines. This way, your images will seem more like a work of art rather than a typical real-estate listing photo. 

Remember the rule of thirds?

One of the most useful interior photography principles is the “rule of thirds.” This refers to a composed image evenly divided into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. The details that you want featured prominently in your images should appear at the intersections of these thirds. 

When you follow these tips for an interior shoot of your kitchen design, you’ll be sure to produce stunning photos. Working with a professional photographer can reduce the amount of time you spend on post-production and editing. That way, your time is free to design more beautiful spaces for your clients.

About Virtuance

Virtuance is one of the fastest-growing real estate photography services in the world. We hire the best photographers and put them through a rigorous certification program to make them masters of real estate marketing and interior photo shoots. Our HDReal technology allows us to produce high-quality images proven to capture 2x more attention than regular HDR photography. Each image passes through a series of 25 proprietary HDReal® algorithms to correct lens distortion, contrast, saturation, tonality, and more. Learn more about kitchen trends and our services here.