Arbor Homes | Des Moines Creative

Photography Direction for Arbor Homes

The Problem

Before implementing our solution, photos were not meeting the high standards. Specific issues included:

Overly Real-Estate Focused Imagery: The photos were functional, but they did not capture the essence of living in an Arbor Homes.

Poor Lighting: Many images were dark and failed to highlight the home’s best features.

Unretouched Skies: Outdoor images lacked the visual appeal needed to grab attention.

Lack of purpose and intention: Photos lacked a story, intention and direction.

These ultimately created a disconnect between brand and brand image by misrepresenting the quality.

The Solution

Artistic and Lifestyle Photography

We visited three Arbor Homes properties with the goal of capturing the unique atmosphere and lifestyle they offer. This new photography style includes:

Peeking Around Corners, Angles & Artistic Shots: Shots were taken from various angles to create a sense of discovery. Photos have blurred corners, views through other rooms, and peeking through mirrors or revealing the space through reflection. These are intentionally more artistic, with a sense of wonder to them. They plays off the story and experience of the home we intend to build through social media.
Live-In Perspectives: Images were designed to reflect the experience of someone in and experiencing the space. These photos are less staged or formal than traditional real-estate photography. To get away from the “real-estate” look, shots might appear to look at books or a vase of flowers as a focal point but the room tells the story. As the viewer is met secondarily with dramatic windows showing a naturescape backdrop . This sense of mystery invites the viewer in deeper than a full room shot might.

Essentially, by saying don’t look here, we offer more interest to what isn’t shown.

Lifestyle: Lifestyle is influence. It can highlight the mundane as elegant and thoughtful. A home considering all elements as intentional, meant to enhance the space. These items being glass wear, organized spices, original furniture pieces, or custom artwork.

Lighting and Design: A portion of shots in homes and as it’s own shoot are intentionally capturing elements of design, lighting and interior design. These will be used later to show art, interior design, tile, fixtures, Dekton by Cosentino. This partners with our tile focus.
Elements of Nature as Intentional Design: Arbor homes enhances the beauty and natural landscapes that the homes are built into. Nature is thoughtfully shown as intentional design elements. By that I mean nature is treated as an object of design in photos, such as a painting in a room might be visually treated in photography. This is particularly relevant to the Frank Lloyd Wright approach of modern emersion of architecture and nature.
Geometric Perspectives: Again, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, we highlighted moments of geometric architecture and contrast. Photos found spaces or rooms with interesting shapes such as triangles, circles, squares. Rather than shoot photos at a direct 180 degree or 90 degree angle, our photos are taken from several angles on a 3D axis rotating x, y, and z for photos that complement these elements. This technique gives depth to the space of the photo, enhancing these intentional architectural decisions by the style of photo.

This approach ensured that every photograph is prepared to tell a story and showcase the luxurious, artistic elements of Arbor Homes.

Editing & More Editing!

It takes work to make photos look this good. Here’s our approach:

Remove Distractions: A great photo can be ruined with by a light switch, a dinosaur statue, or reflection of the photographer. We reduced these moments of visual clutter to focus on the quality of Arbor homes work and craftmanship.

Color Corrected Lighting: Any room that has a mixed lighting of natural and synthetic light will have a distortion to the colors. Our color correction is meant to correct this distortion. We enhanced light, removed color distortions, etc. to offer as close as we can experience to the aesthetic. Of course there’s always a margin of error, which is why we have several photos to choose from!
Retouched Skies: We can’t pick the sky, but you can edit them. I’ve gone in and added real Iowa skies form our collection. By real I mean these are not ai or stock, they’re pulled from our collection to match the day. We’ve added them to enhance the natural aesthetic of an exterior. When a buyer creates an Arbor home, they will have the experience of several beautiful skylines that welcome them home.