Real estate: villas, pools & exteriors

A real-estate photo doesn't sell walls — it sells the dream of a beautiful life, and more often than not it's the photo that first plants that dream. A few tricks of the trade — on timing, pools, the polariser and interiors — woven through with a short tour of absurd luxury.

A villa in the Thai style. One of the best times to shoot real estate is roughly half an hour either side of sunset: just then the brightness of the natural and the artificial light come level, and the colours turn rich and saturated.

Some private villas are so vast they could comfortably house the family of a lord — or a drug lord. There's no real controlling the light on a building that size, so it's best shot closer to sunset, when the sun and the lamps come almost level in brightness.

Night shots of high-end property always look striking — partly because shooting it well at that hour is all but impossible. The secret is to bring the villa's artificial lighting level with the natural light of the sky. And since darkness falls fast in Thailand, the photographer has a minute and a half to two minutes a day for the best shot.

What could be better than your own pool at the villa? Only your own pool at the villa — at sunset.

Owners of good villas know that a pool is, in truth, expensive to keep up and rather impractical. But for the inexperienced buyer the pool is one of the deciding points. So the photographer simply must play it up and show it from its most flattering angle.

An Olympic-sized pool at the villa is, of course, a fine convenience. And to convey a scale like that properly, you'll want a wide-angle lens and a polariser.

And here's what a polariser does. It has stripped the sky's reflection from the surface of the water — which now reads clearer and visually cleaner. And because the bottom of the pool is laid with blue tiles, that new clarity has also lent the water a deep blue. The filter has its drawbacks too, mind, so the trick is knowing when it's actually needed.

Lagoon-type condominiums — where the designer pool and the leisure area are laid out right between the blocks — are a great favourite with tourists. Shooting places like these, it's important to show the lushness of the greenery and the clarity of the water, and here again the polariser earns its keep.

A good villa is bound to have its own VIP cinema. To heighten the sense of magic and exclusivity, I shot the ceiling lights as little stars — for that effect you stop the lens right down.

Allow me to present a modest villa. Capacity: one hereditary exploiter and fifty servants. For a mere two million dollars, it can be yours.

A lavish villa is good for plenty of reasons: you can throw a wild pool party there, and it looks wonderful in photos. Some buy a villa precisely for the parties, but most do it to make real their dream of a beautiful life. And the first nudge toward that purchase is, as often as not, a beautiful photograph.