Phones have gotten good. A new iPhone or Pixel merges several exposures every time you press the button, and outdoors on a sunny day the results can look great.
Listing photos are mostly taken indoors, though, and a Michigan living room in February is a hard room to photograph. Here's what goes wrong when you shoot one on a phone.
The bright window
Picture a family room with a big window looking out on the backyard. The window is many times brighter than the far corner of the room. A phone has to pick one, and it usually splits the difference. The room comes out gray and flat, the window comes out white, and the yard you wanted buyers to see is gone. Sometimes you also get a glowing halo around the window frame, where the phone's processing tried to blend the two.
We shoot that room as several exposures and blend them in editing, so the walls are the right brightness and the yard shows through the glass. That's the HDR editing included with every order.
The dark room
Basements, interior bathrooms and hallways with no windows are the opposite problem. There isn't enough light, so the phone raises its sensitivity and smooths out the noise, and you lose the detail in the carpet, the trim and the tile. Overhead bulbs make it worse, because they're yellow and the daylight from the next room is blue. The phone picks one color balance for the whole frame, so half the room comes out tinted.
The lens
To fit a whole room in, you'd switch to the phone's 0.5x ultra-wide lens. It bends straight lines near the edges of the frame, and if you tilt the phone up even a little, the walls lean in. A small bedroom can end up looking either cramped or strangely stretched, and buyers notice when they see it in person.
The outside
Gray skies, low winter sun and snow glare are hard on any camera. On a phone you get a white sky and a dark front of the house. We replace the sky on every exterior, and every order comes with a virtual twilight image.
What it does to the price
All of this changes how expensive the house looks. A $450,000 listing shot on a phone can look like a $300,000 house, and a buyer scrolling through everything at $450,000 will open the ones that look the part.
The time it saves you
The usual reason for shooting a listing yourself is speed. In most cases we can shoot the next day, and photos are delivered within 24 hours. If the listing has to go live the day of the shoot, same-day delivery gets you the photos by 8pm.
