This is a continuation of a series that seeks to help agents improve their home photography. Part one discusses camera backs, Part two discusses the tilt/shift lens used to take the photos in this article. You do not have to use an expensive camera to implement most of these suggestions--I use the images from from my primary camera/lens only because that's what I use to take my photos, and I prefer to use real-life examples for these articles. If you like this post, you might also check out the posts on Photographing Kitchens and another on Photographing Family Rooms.
Photographing Bathrooms
Of all the rooms, baths are often the most neglected in photographs. However, wonderful pictures of the modern retreat can portray the best in modern conveniences of a newer home. Older homes may have upgraded baths that make a home more attractive. And sometimes baths are just plain fun.
Baths have attributes that make them unique for photographing and can make them easier or more difficult:
More Difficult | Less Difficult |
There can be a lot of mirrors which makes it hard for the photographer to stay out of the image. | Mirrors help to bounce the light around, which can make it much easier to brighten it with just a little flash |
Older baths can be narrow or “tight” spaces, making it difficult to back up adequately to photograph the entire bath. | The shiny metal and clean surfaces can make for a very appealing and interesting photograph, especially if there is some color added. |
Two room baths (a sink area and a bath tub/toilet area) can make proper exposure for both rooms at the same time more difficult | Often the bath photo is a smaller photo on the brochure because of its reduced importance, and this gives room for being less than perfect. |
Let’s start with some staging pointers:
- Always turn on all the lights
- If the bath tub has a curtain or the shower has frosted glass, open up the curtain/doors if the fixtures within are attractive.
- Make sure to remove clutter like shaving cream, shampoo/conditioner, razors, etc.
- f there are candles that have been lit, light them.
- Make sure that the towels on the towel rack are either neatly presented or removed.
- LOWER the toilet seat if it will be visible in the photo. See example!
- If the fixtures are not so shiny and can be made prettier with a quick wipe down, then wipe them down.
Lighting pointers
- Turn down the flash power – you won’t need it in a small room
- If the bath has two rooms, make sure to place a remote flash in back part of the bath
Some examples will show you what you can do with bath photos, and how they can be improved.
As you can see, I shifted the lens to the left, took a picture, then to the right and took another photo. Then I took the middle picture and used a fuzzy eraser to remove the edge. I used care not to erase too much of the left shower as I wanted to replace the hot spot in the first left photo. The composite that resulted looks good, but there is still room for improvement.
You may have read about "high dynamic range" photography elsewhere on AR. This simply means that you take multiple exposures of the room so that you get the full range of bright whites to dark blacks. The issue is, of course, which part of what photos you use. The new version of Photoshop has a feature that will automatically blend various parts of the images. I'm not going to go into the various technical issues that need to be addressed to use this capability to make photos look good.
For me, I expose the primary parts of the photo for the interior exposure. That's what the first three photos of this group are all about. The camera has been set on MANUAL, and I am bouncing the flash off the ceiling that is just over the camera. This disperses and adds to the light that is in the room and helps whiten up the whites and pop the colors. NOTE: My flash is on a two foot cord; this allows me to hold the flash away from the camera and point it at the ceiling towards the wall so it is taking a couple of bounces before going into the room.
MOVING ON TO THE LAST PARTS OF THE PHOTO SEQUENCE - You'll notice that I then took a photo of the room, but exposed for the OUTSIDE light coming in from the windows. Basically, I moved the shutter from about a tenth of a second to an 80th of a second, which DRAMATICALLY reduced how much light came in through the window. That's why the white hot windows (see the first couple of pictures) are now showing blue, blue sky. I simply cut out the windows and then pasted them on top of the composite, thus yielding the final photo. Very nice, I think.
A SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT SHOOTING WINDOWS: If you plan on doing this kind of window cut/paste, let me give you an important suggestion. If you decrease the light to 20% of the previous light and take the photo, the room is going to go dark. What does that mean? It means the frame around the window is going to go dark AND it means that the window blinds are going to get DULL GREY. THIS IS BAD, and it's going to make your final image look bad. So, how do you fix this? You shoot your flash RIGHT AT the window. In this case, I aimed the flash between the two windows. Thus, I didn't get glare off the windows. BUT I DID FULLY ILLUMINATE THE BLINDS so that they MATCH the amount of light that I exposed for in the upper composite photos. Thus, the final picture looks natural and it is hard to know that the windows were cut and pasted into the picture.
So, following my advice, what did I do right and what did I do wrong in this photo. Here's my markup:
As you can see, a lot of what I did was simply clean up, removing stuff and repositioning it. However, the choice of where I positioned the camera determined what reflections that I saw in the mirror. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO CONSIDER WHEN PHOTOGRAPHING BATHROOMS! I ended up standing in the walk-in closet with the camera at the doorway of the closet. By shooting it at the angle I chose, I got the very nice reflection of the flowers that I posed on the bath (normally flowers weren't at that location). I also got a great reflection of the curves of the shower fixtures, and this added nice movement.
I also closed the toilet door, which avoided distraction. By dragging the shutter (i.e., using a very slow shutter speed), I got a nice glow off the lights. By adjusting the blinds, I maximized the amount of sky that was visible. In short, BY SLOWING DOWN, I was able to pick up the room and adjust it to maximize the effect of the photo.
THE RED ARROW - You'll notice I put a red arrow towards a hot spot. That was the reflection in the mirror of the flash bouncing off the ceiling. It would have been a bit tricky to remove it completely, and I decided to leave it since it was off to the far upper right (and my guess is that you didn't notice it until I pointed it out).
Let's move on to a photo in an larger bath where I can illustrate another important point. Again, I am posting the series of photos that I took so you can see how the images were assembled.
The important thing in this sequence is to see how I illuminated the room in the reflection of the mirror and the walk-in closet. First the room - To get this component, I am pretty sure (if I remember correctly) that I took one of my slave flashes (which has an electro-eye to detect a flash) and I placed it in the master behind me. Then, I took a picture of the mirror and I pointed my flash on my long cord towards the room. (I set my handheld flash at very low power so it would trigger the full-power flash in the master.) That lit up the room and I cut it out of the photo so that I could paste it into my composite.
I did exactly the same thing with the walk-in closet. The flash was hidden in the right part of the closet flashing towards the ceiling. I bounced my handheld flash off the ceiling which triggered the interior flash, and that gave me the component I needed. BUT, when I pasted the component into the picture, it looked WEIRD. The closet was as bright as the room, and my brain told me that it shouldn't be - that remote closets with no windows aren't as bright as the main bath areas. So, I set the component's transparency to 70% so it only partially brightened up the closet to a point where I thought it looked believable. This illustrates an important rule - It has to look real - If you play games with your picture and it looks weird, people won't be comfortable with it as an accurate representation.
Finally, you'll notice that I brightened the overall levels just a tad. The original looked just a bit muddy, and I thought the bath would look a little lighter and brighter. This is IMPORTANT when going to press because your printed images will be darker, and so I wanted the final printed image to look bright and not muddy.
DID YOU CATCH THE ERRORS IN THE PREVIOUS PHOTO? - I made a few mistakes when I took the last photo. First, did you notice that black blob on the far left? That's the camera in the reflection of the mirror. That wasn't a really bad mistake as I knew I could crop the picture and remove it. BUT, if you can, just rotate the camera a bit and leave it out to start. The second error was an "I didn't take the time for a final check" error. I forgot to turn on the vanity lights! Those should have been on! Fortunately, the amount of light streaming in from the glass doors made the room bright, which is why I probably did not notice it. But if I had to reshoot it, I would definitely turn on the lights! Also, when I look back on the photo, I really do not like that black electric cord dangling. I should probably have tidied up a bit more and done things like centering the towels.
Oh, and I do want to comment on one thing that I thought I did right in the last photo. I kep the camera high enough so that you could see how deep the tub was. This was a really deep tub, and if the camera would have been lower, the depth would not have been as obvious.
I hope this has helped you think about photographing bathrooms. If you have some tips for others, please leave a comment.
Margaret Hokkanen, Carlsbad Real Estate
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Wow...very nice...and what a lot of work to explain all this for us! Thank you so much! I'm bookmarking this for future reference.