Capturing Your Home in the Best Light with Roy Wright
Is a picture truly worth a thousand words? When it comes to the world of real estate photography, absolutely.
Roy Wright is a Jersey City based architecture and real estate photographer whose career began in New York City in the 1980s. His work has been featured in international exhibits and publications including Interiors, Architectural Record, Architecture, The New York Times Grid, Arts and Antiques, The London Times, and Vanity Fair.
At the Moorefield Group, we rely on Roy’s expertise to create photographs of our residential listings that portray them in the most accurate light. “When I shoot I strive to portray or illustrate the true essence of a home,” he explains. “Think about your immediate reaction when walk into a space that you immediately fall in love with. You are absorbing everything that your brain is processing visually in a way that a camera cannot, such as space in shadow. My job in photographing a space is to make up for that through various techniques.”
How did you become specialized in photographing architecture and real estate?
“I fell into it, to be honest. I originally set out to work in photo illustration or fashion photography. Then one year, I ended up assisting an architectural photographer. My first assignment with him was working on the I.M. Pei Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong. When we came back to New York, I signed on with his rep as well. This kind of photography was a much less crowded field back then. Everything was on film, there was nothing like Photoshop, obviously, and there were much less people willing to do the kind of hard work involved to set up a shoot.”
Do you use digital editing software like Photoshop today?
“It’s a combination of my techniques from the film era with some digital correction in Photoshop. However Photoshop is not how you create, it is how you edit. I know that people are in a hurry and want to execute a shoot as fast as possible. So while I work as quickly as I can, I make sure to properly stage and set up a shot, and not try to recreate it later with something like Photoshop. You won’t get the same result or quality.”
Is it hard to build consensus on a photo shoot about the look or angles of a shot?First off, the client is the art director. Sometimes they know what they want or what they don’t want, other times they need input. That said, different clients will look at the same space and each want something completely different. A real estate broker will want a shot of all four walls of an entire room. An architect wants to zoom in on a specific problem they fixed, or how one wall meets another. A decorator wants to focus on a beautiful painting hanging on one of those walls. They have their own expertise and know what they want. And they don’t need to know what I do, or they wouldn’t need a professional photographer. And in the end, we all want the same finished product of photographs that represent the beauty of a space in the truest light.”
http://www.roywright.net/. 917-450-6029