How to Photograph Your Home Interiors

Height and level: the two rules

Professional interior photographs are taken from a lower camera position than people expect. At eye height, roughly 1,600 mm, a camera looks slightly down on furniture and makes a room feel small and top-heavy. At 1,200–1,400 mm — chest height, or the height of a kitchen counter — the furniture reads at its proper scale and the floor plane opens up. Almost every published interior photograph is taken from within that band.

The second rule is that the camera must be level. The moment it tilts up or down, vertical lines in the room converge, and a wardrobe that is plumb in reality leans in the photograph. Every phone has a level indicator in the camera settings; turn it on and use it. On a phone this single change produces a bigger improvement than any other adjustment available, and it costs nothing.

Light: the hour and the mix

Interiors photograph best in bright indirect daylight, which in a Mumbai flat means a north-facing room at almost any hour, an east-facing room after about 11 am, and a west-facing room before about 2 pm. Direct sun through a window creates a contrast range no camera can hold: either the window is a white rectangle or the room is black. If the sun is in the window, wait, or shoot from an angle where the window is behind the camera.

The second light problem is mixing colour temperatures. A room lit by 2700 K lamps and daylight at 5500 K in the same frame cannot be white-balanced correctly; one of the two will look wrong whatever you do afterwards. The practical answer for a home photograph is to turn every artificial light off during the day and shoot on daylight alone, or wait until dusk and shoot entirely on the lamps with the daylight almost gone. That second option, at the twenty minutes of blue hour, produces the warmest and most flattering interior photographs available to anyone.

Guides

Design and build under one accountable roof

The ten-minute styling pass

1. Remove thirty per cent of the objects. Not the things you like — the remotes, chargers, bottles, cables, laundry, the third cushion. A room reads as calm when it is emptier than it is in life.
2. Straighten everything. Square the cushions, align the books, straighten the rug to the wall, close the wardrobe doors fully.
3. Hide the cables. The single most visible failure in amateur interior photographs is a black cable running down a pale wall.
4. Add one living thing. A plant, flowers, a bowl of fruit. A perfectly tidy room with nothing alive in it photographs as a showroom.
5. Layer three heights on any surface. Something tall, something medium, something low, in a group of three. This is the single styling trick that reads as professional.
6. Check the floor. Shoes, bags, pet bowls and the edge of a rug that has curled. The floor occupies a third of most interior frames and gets no attention.
7. Look at the frame edges before you press the shutter. Most bad photographs are ruined at the edges, not the centre.

Composition that works in a small flat

Two compositions do most of the work in a small Indian flat. The first is the one-point view: stand in a doorway or a corner, face a wall square on, and keep the camera perfectly level and centred. Everything is symmetrical, the vanishing point is in the middle, and the room looks ordered. The second is the two-wall view: stand in a corner and frame two walls meeting, which shows depth and how the space turns.

Resist the ultra-wide lens. The 0.5x setting on a phone will fit a whole room into one frame and will also bend the edges, stretch the furniture at the sides and make a 3.4-metre room look like a hall, which fools nobody and looks distinctly like an estate agent's photograph. Use the standard 1x lens, accept that you cannot show the whole room, and take two photographs instead. A partial view that looks real is worth more than a complete view that looks warped.

Tidy for ten minutes, drop the camera to chest height and keep it level. That is ninety per cent of the difference.

Greenbox principal designer

Editing, and how far to take it

Four adjustments cover almost every interior photograph, and they are available in any phone's built-in editor. Straighten first, because a one-degree rotation fixes more than any other single change. Then lift the shadows, which recovers the dark corners a camera underexposes in a bright room. Then pull the highlights down to bring back some detail in the window. Finally, correct the white balance so white surfaces read as white rather than as cream or blue.

Where to stop is a judgement about honesty. Straightening, exposure and white balance are corrections — they bring the photograph closer to what you saw. Removing objects, replacing skies, and stretching a room's proportions are changes, and anyone who visits the flat will notice. For a home you are selling or renting, that distinction has practical consequences: a photograph that oversells produces disappointed viewings, which is worse than no viewing. Correct the image; do not invent it.

• Straighten before anything else. One degree of rotation makes more difference than any filter.
• Lift shadows, lower highlights, then stop. Over-processed interiors look flat and grey.
• Fix the white balance against a genuinely white object in the frame — a wall, a sheet of paper, a cushion.
• Avoid heavy filters and high saturation. Interiors photograph best slightly understated.
• Export at full resolution if the photograph is going anywhere other than a chat message.

Selected work by Greenbox Design Studio. Tap any image to enlarge.