Think before you shoot
Better-quality digital photos give you more options.

High-resolution digital photos certainly eat up your camera’s precious memory. So, you probably leave your camera on a medium- to low-quality setting to maximize the number of photos you can fit on the memory card or internal drive.

That approach works fine for e-mail, Web sites—anything displayed on a computer screen. Sometimes, however, a low-quality picture won’t do. Have you ever seen a low-resolution photo used on a property flier? It’s not pretty.

The sets of images at right show why it’s sometimes necessary to take high-resolution photos.

Image A was taken with the camera’s low-resolution setting. Look closely and you’ll see that the details are a little fuzzy. You could get away with posting this picture as a thumbnail on your Web site or including it as the listing photo in the MLS.

Image B is the result of editing Image A: zooming in on the house and cropping the lawn and street out of the original photo. It’s the type of thing you’d do to create an attractive picture for the top of a listing flier—and look how it turned out using the low-resolution photo. Think of how Image B would look splashed across half of a listing flier. Would you use that picture to market this listing?

The bottom set of images show the same listing. However, Image C was taken using the camera’s high-resolution setting. Notice how clear the lines and details are compared to Image A.

Performing the same zoom and crop on the high-resolution Image C resulted in Image D, which is suitable for use online or in print.

When you break out your digital camera to photograph a listing, think about where you’re going to use the images. If it’s possible you’ll want to do more with your pictures than post a tiny image on the Web, switch to a higher resolution.

Photo © Ward Lowe.

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