You can't hug your children with exploding ARMs: How to take a half decent real estate photo

I know this house, it's a very nice house, but you wouldn't know it from this picture.

Real estate companies have done some wonderful new things to attract buyers over the past few years, but taking a simple picture of a house isn't one of them. Why have a virtual tour and mapping data when your cover shot looks so very bad? Here are some easy tips for getting a better picture:

• Take the picture with the sun at your back. This will give your background some sky and illuminate your target; do this even on an overcast day. Different times of the day will produce different results; it may be a good idea to target the front of the house in the morning and the back in the afternoon or vice versa. Do not try pasting a blue sky in, after the fact, unless you're real good with Photoshop - real good.


• Hold the camera level and plumb. If your camera is pointed too far down or up, it will distort the photo, making your house look weird. It's better to crop out half the shot than to depict a warped looking structure.


• Speaking of cropping, do you really want that much lawn in your picture? Most of the lawn-care freaks died out with my parents' generation.


• Bracket. This simply means taking a picture at the normal settings and then a darker shot and a lighter shot. Some cameras have an auto-bracket option: use it.


• Try again. If you don't like the first shots, take some more. I mean it's your house, you're trying to get a good price, right? Oh, and set your camera to the highest quality setting, it does make a difference.