Virtual staging guide
How to photograph an empty room for staging
Staging can only be as good as the photograph underneath it. Four things decide whether the result looks like the same room photographed twice or like furniture dropped onto a picture of a room.
Stand in a corner, at chest height
- A corner gives you two walls and a receding floor, which is what makes a flat image read as a space.
- Hold the camera at roughly 1.4 metres and keep it level; tilting up widens the floor and flattens the far wall.
- Step back until both far corners are in frame, or shoot from the doorway if the room is too small.
Use the daylight, not the ceiling light
- Shoot with curtains open and room lights off, in the middle of the day if the room faces south.
- Avoid direct sun on the floor, which blows out the highlights and hides the floor material the staging sits on.
- If the room is dark, add a floor lamp in frame rather than raising the exposure afterwards.
The four mistakes
- Wide-angle distortion: a phone at 0.5x bends the walls and makes furniture look tapered.
- Shooting into the window, which turns the room into a silhouette.
- Clutter left in frame, such as a bin, a cable or a box, that the staging will not remove.
- Cropping out the floor or the ceiling line, which removes the reference the eye needs for scale.
Related
Staging a living room · /how-to/measure-a-room-for-staging · /tool
Staging keeps the walls, windows and camera angle of your photograph; only the furnishing is added. Upload the room and the frame comes back at the resolution you sent.