Make bedroom photos read calm, bright, and honestly sized.

Guests are reading the bed, not the room

A bedroom photo answers one question before any other: will I sleep well here. That judgement is made from the bed itself — whether the linen looks clean, whether the mattress looks supported, whether the headboard is against a wall rather than a window, and whether there is somewhere to put a glass of water. A technically excellent photograph of a bedroom that crops the foot of the bed has failed at the only job it had.

This is why bedroom photos survive being slightly darker than other rooms. A living room needs to look spacious and a kitchen needs to look clean, but a bedroom needs to look restful, and rest photographs warm. Correcting a bedroom to daylight neutral often makes it look like a hotel corridor.

Small bedrooms and the doorway problem

Second and third bedrooms are usually shot from the doorway because there is nowhere else to stand. That puts the camera at the narrow end of the room with a wide lens, which stretches the near corner of the bed and compresses the far wall. The room looks longer and thinner than it is, and the wardrobe on the near wall disappears out of frame entirely.

Perspective correction fixes the leaning walls but cannot recover the wardrobe. If storage is a selling point, it needs a second frame. A corrected photo of half the room is still a photo of half the room.

• Shoot from the corner beside the door rather than square in the doorway
• Keep the camera at about chest height so the bed does not tower
• Include at least one full wardrobe or storage wall in the set
• Turn bedside lamps on and the overhead light off