Why do real estate photos all have “that look”?

Question

When scrolling through galleries of photos for residential (and some commercial) properties, it always seems like the perspective is off. But each picture seems a little differently off – almost like a fisheye lens, but not. What are they using to do that and why has that “look” become industry standard, even when we all know the pictures aren’t true to life?

In: Technology

Answer 1

**Wide angle lens.**

The frame of a camera is a rectangle, and our vision is basically round.

So, we gen a camera sees the same way we do, you capture less of what we see with our eyes, because it’s limited by the rectangular frame.

To include what we see with our peripheral vision, we have to cram more into the same rectangular space.

This is done using wide angle lenses. And yes, a fisheye lens is a type of wide angle lens but an extreme one.

So a real estate photographer picks a wide angle lens so that they can cram what you see with your eye into a nice rectangular frame.

You can do the same thing yourself with your 0.5x setting in your phone camera.

Wide angle lenses of course means the image is distorted in a way – the center of the frame is compressed and the edges are stretched. It’s literally like tunnel vision.

But why use this at all? Why not just back up and take a photo?

Because most of the time, you can back up all the way with your back to the wall and you still can’t represent in a frame what you can see with your peripheral vision.

And it is this peripheral vision that gives us a sense of space. The photos may not be accurate and make the space seem larger than it is, but picking the “accurate” lens has a problem: it only shows a very myopic/claustrophobic view of a room or hall, typically just half or a third of a room. You don’t want to look at a photo of a room and just see a window and a foot’s worth of side wall.

What’s more, there’s no good way to show one side of a room with a reasonably significant amount of adjacent walls. With the “accurate” lens, yo be able to show a whole room, you will inevitably have nano with a photo that is literally “all wall”. Like, literally a blank slate of color – and that doesn’t help anyone and it definitely looks unprofessional.