How To Take Student Accommodation Pictures on Your Phone

Many student accommodation providers and mainly student letting agents have landlords who don’t want to pay for professional photos and simply now have too many houses in order to get round them all before the deadline of marketing them again!

For many reasons, a lot of photos you see online today have been taken on a phone and I thought that I would give a quick guide on how you can make the most of the photos on your phone so your quality stays high.

Phone cameras are getting better and better each year with new releases and they are coming up with more and more technology to make it more and more interesting.

Lining The Room Up

This is where you need to focus on where you have objects in the room in the photo.

If you don’t use the grid on your phone screen so that you can line up objects and make sure the camera is level.

You can play around with where you place the objects, you can put them on the left, centre or right hand side of the photo be please make sure they are in the middle when you are going from top to bottom.

This will mean that you get a nice equal shot and that a bed isn’t at the top of the photo and the rest of it is just the floor.

Focus

Make sure you are focused on something or somewhere, this will draw the attention of the eye to that particular object.

You don’t want to make the outsides blurry like you can if you are focusing on someone’s face, however, you need a focal point of the photograph which is very similar to lining the room up. Know what you want to focus on and make sure it gets in the shot.

Light & Brightness

This has been spoken about before but make sure you get the house as bright as you can and get ring lights for your phone, there are some in which you can attach to a tripod and there are some freestanding ones that you will need to plugin!

Turn the lights on in the house and make sure you have a lot of natural light coming in through the windows.

While on your phone, try not to face a window and take a picture in to the light, face the same way as the window and use the natural light to brighten the photo naturally!

Symmetry

Symmetry is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, you will find a lot of this in a bedroom and kitchens mostly, however, if you have places like this, get a good snap of it and make sure it goes on the website.

A classic is having two walls the same colour and using that to create symmetry!

Negative Spaces

Now earlier we spoke about lining your photo up so that you don’t have lots of redundant space, well this is true however, if there is one particular object you want to focus on, that space, negative space, will help draw peoples eyes to it.

A classic example of this would be some kind of feature in the corner of a room, a TV on the wall that you want to focus on and all these smaller elements rather than show casing the whole room.

Here you don’t want to get too in to this and show case your best bedside lamps, save these for your show stoppers!

No Zooming In

Now after the pandemic, all people did was Zoom each other, on this matter, please don’t zoom in, the picture becomes blurry and the camera becomes very unstable and hard to hold still.

No Flash at Night

Having a flash on during the day will enhance the brightness in the room, however, if you are taking pictures in the evening, then it doesn’t do the photo justice as it only lights a small amount of the room. This is where your ring lights will come in!

Always try and take them during the day to maximise the best chances!

Clean Your Lens

This sounds really simple and easy however, how often do we pick our phones up and put them down? It is likely we will smudge the lens at some point, make sure you just give it a quick clean before you take your photos.

If you want to get really fancy, you can get a lens which you can attach to your phone to give you better pictures, however, I haven’t used one of these so couldn’t comment on which are the best!

Use HDR

HDR mode stands for High Dynamic Range. It adds detail from the dark and light areas to provide better balanced exposure. This is good when light is beaming in from a window but there is a slightly darker patch in the corner, you can either light it up or use this to balance it out!

Edit Photos

Once you have taken some great photos then you can edit them to make them look much better.

Even if it is to apply a filter, increase the brightness or contrast, you don’t have to get too technical, but just simply playing around with the components of the picture might bring out a better result for you.

I would say, stay away from filters that change the colours, for example, black and white, all pink, all blue, you want something that is going to enhance what you have already!

Apps To Help You

• Snapseed
• Adobe Photoshop Express
• MagicPlan
• Room Sketcher
• Canva – You can’t edit them in here too much but it is great for getting them out on socials in an interesting way