What to look for
Most of a buyer's time on a listing is spent on the photographs. Yet photography is usually the one line on a marketing budget chosen without any criteria at all, because nobody hands agents the criteria. Here they are.
None of what follows is proprietary. An agent who reads it carefully will be able to judge any photographer's work, including this one's. That is the point. A listing agent who can see the difference is a better client than one who cannot.
Geometry
Vertical lines should be vertical. Door frames, window mullions, and the corners of a room should run straight up the frame rather than leaning toward the center or splaying outward. Leaning verticals are the single most common tell of a rushed shoot, and once noticed they cannot be unseen. Check the edges of the frame rather than the middle. That is where the distortion shows.
Look at the height the room was shot from. A camera set too low makes ceilings loom and exposes the underside of upper cabinets; too high and the room flattens. The frame should sit near standing eye level, because that is the view the buyer will have when they walk in.
Color
Find something in the frame that is known to be white, such as trim, cabinetry, or a ceiling, and ask whether it is actually white. A blue, green, or yellow cast across white paint means the color temperature was never corrected, and it will misrepresent every finish in the house. Buyers may not name the problem, but they register the room as cold or dingy.
Mixed lighting is where this gets difficult. Daylight through a window, warm household bulbs, and cool recessed fixtures are three different color temperatures in one room, and a single global correction cannot fix all three. Frames that hold neutral whites under mixed light took deliberate work.
Windows
Look through the glass. In most listing photography, windows are blown to flat white because the interior was exposed correctly and the exterior was not. A great many properties in this region sell on their view, and a blown-out window deletes that view from the marketing entirely. Windows should hold what is outside them: the trees, the ridgeline, the water.
Room by room
In bathrooms, check the mirrors. A camera, a tripod, or a photographer reflected back at the viewer is common and instantly cheapens a listing. Check the shower and toilet placement in the frame as well; both can be handled with care or not at all.
In kitchens, look for range rather than repetition: a wide frame establishing the space, then the specific features that justify the price, the slab, the appliance package, the sightline from the sink. A set of near-identical wide shots from four corners is coverage, not marketing.
Consistency across the set
View the gallery as a whole rather than frame by frame. Do the rooms look like they belong to the same house on the same day? Shifting color, exposure, and contrast across a set is a sign that images were corrected individually rather than to a single profile, and it makes a coherent home read as a collection of unrelated spaces.
Look for variety of composition, too. A portfolio where every frame is the same wide shot from the doorway shows a photographer with one solution. Vaulted ceilings, narrow galleys, and open floor plans each demand something different.
Video
The common failure is over-editing. Count the cuts. If the pace never rests long enough for a viewer to understand how one room connects to the next, the video is showing motion rather than a house. Transitions should be nearly invisible; whip pans and speed ramps draw attention to the edit rather than the property.
Listen to the music against the cuts. Sound chosen to fit the house reads as cinematic. Sound chosen at random reads as a template, and a template is what a buyer assumes about the listing too. The video should also carry both wide establishing coverage and close detail, and it should incorporate aerial where the setting warrants it.
Aerial
Aerial work should answer questions the ground cannot: the size and shape of the parcel, where the boundaries fall, how the approach reads, what sits next door, and how close the property is to what buyers care about being close to. Altitude alone is not information. A single high shot straight down over the roof tells a buyer very little.
Ask whether the operator holds an FAA Part 107 certificate, and ask before booking. Commercial drone work without one is not legal, and the liability sits with the listing, not only with the pilot.
The galleries on this site carry a short note beneath each frame describing what was controlled for in it. Process covers scheduling, aerial operations, and delivery.