How to Prepare your Home for an In-Home Photo Session
So you’ve booked an In-Home Photo Session! How exciting! But it might also be causing some anxiety, which I am here to lay to rest. Do not worry, you do NOT have to clean your whole house for an In-Home session! It is however good to have certain areas decluttered. Here are some important tips and tricks:
Consult With Your Photographer
Do ask your photographer for advice on where they might want to photograph in your home. Most likely if you are reading this, its because I am your photographer, so consult me! I love to have my clients send me some pictures of their house. So go around your house and snap a few pictures of the main rooms OR do a quick walkthrough video. You do NOT need to clean for these photos and I will NOT be looking at any messes. What I am looking at is the light in your house, and which rooms will work best to have our main moments photographed based on where the light is coming in. Once you have shown me this, I usually will suggest one or two specific spots that I think will work best for photos. This way, you can focus any organizing on a small corner of your house where we will actually be photographing! For example in the picture above, I instantly noticed the wonderful kitchen windows, and told my client that we wouldn’t be using the livingroom at all and that I wanted to take the majority of photos in their kitchen! And in that whole kitchen, we really only needed this one counter to be cleared off, and all other counters could still have stuff on them! Consulting with your photographer (me or otherwise) will help you focus any decluttering on a small area, instead of feeling like the house itself needs to be clean. It does not!
2. Focus on Removing/Moving Clutter, not Cleaning
When getting your house ready for a photo session, you do NOT need to mop, dust or vacuum. This will not show up in photographs in most situations. Instead focus on organizing the clutter: those small items that might stick out and be distracting in the background. Organize it if you wish, OR it is perfectly fine to just move it temporarily into a corner that won’t be photographed. If you know we won’t be using a particular room, feel absolutely free to just move things into that space. We are looking for relatively clean backgrounds, meaning less distractions, not dustfree.
Some things to consider:
1. Remove/move small loose items in the background that might show up in photographs.
2. When possible, hide cables. Cables are among the main things that I usually have to edit out of the backgrounds of photographs in people’s homes. They tend to draw the eye and are distracting.When able, try to hide them.
3. Only one angle/direction of the room needs to be decluttered. If we are taking pictures on your master bed, the opposite side of the room does NOT have to be clean! Look at just the wall your master bed is on and try to remove any clutter off of dressers or the top/sides of the bed. Feel free to just move these items to the opposite side of the room where they would not be in the photo anyways.
4. Think tidy not sterile. This is still your home and we want to photograph YOUR home, not a generic hotel room. Don’t feel like you need to hide everything. Remove the meaningless clutter, but feel free to leave personal touches!
3. Gather Mementos and Meaningful Items
One of the main points of an in-home session as opposed to a studio, is that you are able to include your meaningful belongings in photos as well! We want those personalized touches that help make you YOU. If you have kids, consider collecting some favorite stuffies or toys for us to take some photos of your child interacting with. If you have a particular hobby or an activity you like to do as a family, feel free to include those!
Some items you might consider collecting and highlighting in a photo session: special clothing items, special blankets, memorial items, favorite toys or stuffies, or literally anything that is personally meaningful to you or any other member in your family.
4. Consider Planning an Activity
An activity can be a great thing to photograph, especially if you have kids. Reading a favorite book together as a family is always a great one, but there are all kinds of activities that would work. Preparing a snack or treat together, playing a board game, playing an instrument or playing with a family pet are all great activities that your kids will enjoy doing and will also create fun moments, memories and especially photos!
5. Dress comfortably OR change the temperature of the house temporarily
You will always take better pictures if you are comfortable than if you are uncomfortable, and that is doubly true for children. You do want to coordinate outfits if possible, but they should also be clothes you will be comfortable in. Alternatively, if you for instance would love to wear a dress but it is winter, consider temporarily changing the temperature of the house to warmer than normal! One nice thing about an indoor photoshoot is that we have that control over temperature in a way we do not have outside. An extra thing to consider here is that children and especially newborns run quite a bit cooler on average and usually like warmer temperatures. So especially if you are having an in-home newborn photoshoot, my recommendation would be to turn the temperature up to warmer than you normally would for the duration of the photosession. The photo above was taken on a very cold January day! But the house was toasty warm for the photoshoot.
6. Don’t Stress. We can always adjust mid Photoshoot
Sometimes the easiest thing is simply to adjust things in the middle of the photoshoot. We have moved tables across the room or piled items in a corner midphotoshoot because we decided to try a slightly different angle. Your home does NOT have to be perfectly organized for a photoshoot. There is plenty that we can adjust in the moment. And plenty more we might not even want to adjust, because the whole point is to capture your home as it is!
