How to photograph a kitchen for a property listing

To photograph a kitchen for a property listing, clear the worktops, turn on every light in the room, and shoot from the corner that shows the most units and the island in a single frame. Keep the camera level, a little higher than you would in other rooms, and set the exposure for the units rather than the window. Then take a second wide shot from the opposite side and a detail shot of whatever the kitchen does best.

That's the short version. The rest of this page covers the things that most often go wrong: stainless steel, a window above the sink, and a worktop the seller insists has already been cleared.

Prepare the kitchen before you pick up the camera

Kitchens attract more clutter than any other room, and all of it shows up in a wide-angle photo. I spend more time tidying a kitchen than photographing it.

• Worktops: toaster, coffee machine, knife block, kitchen roll, fruit bowl full of bananas, post. All of it goes into a unit.
• Sink: washing-up liquid, sponge, drying rack, the scrubber on the tap. Empty the sink as well.
• Fridge door: magnets, calendars, kids' drawings, takeaway menus. Buyers read them all when they zoom in.
• Floor: bin, pet bowls, the mat in front of the sink.
• Stainless fronts: wipe fingerprints off the fridge and dishwasher, then the oven door and microwave. Zillow's photography tips for sellers also highlight this, and it is the thing people forget.

Leave one or two items out. A chopping board leaning against the splashback, or a bowl of lemons on the island. A completely bare kitchen can look like a rental property that has never been lived in, but a kitchen with five decorative items looks cluttered in a photo, even if it did not appear that way in person.

Open the blinds above the sink and tuck the stools in so they sit evenly beneath the island. Uneven stools are the kitchen equivalent of a crooked picture frame.

Where to stand

The main shot: corner, units and island together

Walk around the room and find the corner that captures the longest run of units and the island in a single frame. This is usually the corner diagonally opposite the cooker, or the spot just inside the doorway from the family room. The aim is to create depth: two walls of units receding into the distance, with the island in the middle distance.

Keep the island from filling the bottom third of the frame. If you're standing right up to it, all you'll capture is the worktop edge and loads of stone. Take a step or two back.

The reverse shot

Take this from the far side of the island, looking back the way you came. In an open-plan kitchen, this is the shot that shows how it connects to the family room or dining area. Buyers expect to see it. If the kitchen is separate, shoot from the doorway towards the window instead.

The detail shot

Take one close shot of something worth highlighting: a cooker and extractor hood, a farmhouse sink, a tiled splashback, a wine cooler, a walk-in larder. Use the 1x lens or a standard focal length for this. An ultra-wide lens makes details look strange up close.

Galley kitchens are the exception to all of this. There are no corners to stand in, so shoot from one end down the length of the galley, with the camera centred, then from the other end if the two ends look different. Two shots are plenty.

Camera height and keeping it level

In most rooms, I hold the camera around light-switch height. In a kitchen, I go a few inches higher, roughly level with the worktop splashback. From lower down, the worktops shrink to a thin line and you lose what buyers want to see: how much worktop space there is.

The height changes, but the rule doesn't: keep the camera level. Raise it; don't point it down. The moment you tilt down to capture more worktop, the wall units start leaning inwards and the fridge looks as though it's falling over. Kitchens are full of vertical lines, from unit edges to the fridge and extractor hood, so even a slight tilt is obvious here in a way it might not be in a bedroom.

On a phone, turn on the grid and level tool, then line up a unit edge with one of the vertical grid lines. If they run parallel, you're square on. The guide to correcting leaning vertical lines covers this in more detail if a shot goes awry.

Lights: turn them all on

Ceiling lights, pendants over the island, under-cabinet strips, the light in the extractor hood. Every one of them. Under-cabinet lights matter more than people think, because without them the splashback sits in shadow beneath the wall units and appears as a dark stripe across the photo.

The catch is colour. Kitchen bulbs tend to be warm, the window provides daylight, and under-cabinet LEDs are often a third colour. You'll get a yellow cast near the lights and a cooler tone near the window. I leave the lights on anyway. A colour cast can be fixed afterwards. A dark kitchen with one bright window can't be fixed nearly as well.

If you can, ask the seller to replace dead bulbs a few days before the photoshoot and to use the same colour bulb in every fitting. That one request will do more than any amount of editing.

The window over the sink

Most kitchens have a window exactly where you want to point the camera. A phone or camera will try to expose for it, leaving the rest of the kitchen dark. Tap on the cabinets or a wall to set the exposure there instead. On an iPhone, touch and hold until AE/AF Lock appears, so the setting stays fixed while you reframe.

You'll lose most of the view out of the window in a single exposure. That's normal. The phone's own HDR will blend some of it back, and editing can recover more. What you should avoid is exposing for the window and leaving the cabinets looking dull and murky. Nobody is buying the view out of the kitchen window.

Photograph kitchens when the sun isn't shining straight through that window. Strong sunlight on the worktop blows out the highlights and draws the eye to the wrong part of the room. Bright overcast light is ideal.

Stainless steel, glass and other reflections

A stainless steel fridge is a mirror with handles. So are the oven door, microwave, glass-fronted cabinets and a glossy splashback. Before each shot, check every reflective surface in the frame for three things:

• You. Step out of the fridge's line of sight, or shoot it from a steeper angle. Use the phone's timer or a remote and leave the room if necessary.
• The flash, if it went off. Turn it off. A flash in a kitchen creates a bright hotspot on every shiny surface and makes the room look flat.
• Pendant lights reflected in the glass cabinet fronts. Move a foot to the left or right and they will usually shift out of the way.

Shooting a fridge head-on is almost always a mistake. At an angle, it reflects the cabinets across the room, which looks natural. Head-on, it reflects whoever is holding the camera.

Editing the kitchen shots

A kitchen photo taken straight on a phone usually needs three things: the yellow cast removed, the window recovered and the verticals straightened by a degree or two. You can do that by hand in Lightroom or the phone's photo editor. Lightroom's Upright tool handles the verticals well, but getting the white balance right can take a few attempts when the room is lit with two or three different colours.

Real Estate Camera's Enhance does those three things in one pass. It corrects the lighting and white balance and straightens the verticals in 20 to 60 seconds, using 1 credit. It doesn't alter the cabinets, worktops or anything else in the room, nor replace the view through the window with a more attractive one.

Take a moment to look at the before shot. The lights were on, the worktops were clear, and it was still hard to use because of the colour. That's typical of a kitchen photo taken on a phone, which is why I'd rather correct the colour afterwards than photograph a dark room.

If the seller's kitchen is empty and you're staging the whole house virtually, Virtual staging includes the kitchen as a room type, costing 2 credits per photo. Staged files are flagged as "virtually staged" in the app. Check Virtual staging MLS rules before you upload, as labelling requirements vary between boards.

A quick kitchen checklist

1. Worktops and sink cleared, fridge door bare. Stainless steel wiped down.
2. Every light on, including under-cupboard and cooker hood lights. Blinds open.
3. Flash off.
4. Main shot from the corner with the most cupboards and the island.
5. Camera a little above chest height, level, with a cupboard edge aligned to the grid.
6. Exposure set on the cupboards, not the window.
7. Check the fridge, oven door and microwave for your reflection.
8. Reverse shot from the far side of the island.
9. One detail shot at 1x, only if something is worth photographing.

The kitchen photos usually go immediately after the living room in the gallery. The room-by-room shot list covers the full sequence, and taking property photos on an iPhone covers the iPhone settings in more detail.

To shoot and edit your kitchen photos in one app, see the real estate photography app.

Sort out the mixed lighting in your next kitchen photo. Start free: 1 credit.