You can stage every room perfectly, hire the best photographer in London, and still end up with flat, lifeless images. The difference between a listing that stops the scroll and one that gets skipped is almost always lighting.
Lighting affects every aspect of property marketing, from still property photography to walkthrough property videography. Understanding how light works in your property — and what you can do about it — is one of the most practical things you can learn before a marketing shoot.
Why We Respond to Natural Light
Humans are drawn to natural light. Biologists call it biophilia — an instinctive attraction to natural environments that's been part of our wiring for thousands of years. A room filled with daylight doesn't just look better in photos. It feels better. Safer. More liveable.
This matters for property marketing because the emotional response happens before any conscious evaluation. A buyer scrolling through Rightmove isn't analysing the light quality in your kitchen — they're reacting to it. Bright, naturally lit spaces stop the scroll. Dark, flat interiors get passed over. Research from the National Association of Realtors confirms that 85% of buyers rate photos as the most important factor when deciding which properties to view. The quality of light in those photos shapes the decision.
Three Lighting Approaches — and When Each Works
Not every property gets the same treatment. The right lighting approach depends on the space, the time of day, and what you're producing — stills, video, or both.
Natural light only
Every curtain open, every artificial light switched off. This works well in properties with generous windows and good orientation — south or west-facing living spaces, for example, or modern builds with large glazing areas. The result is clean, honest, and true to what a buyer will actually experience when they visit.
Where it falls short: north-facing rooms, basement flats, period properties with smaller windows. Pure natural light in these spaces produces flat, grey interiors that undersell the room. If a space doesn't get strong daylight, relying on natural light alone forces the photographer to push exposure, which introduces grain and washes out colour.
Natural light with interior lights
This is what most people instinctively do — turn everything on. Sometimes it helps. A warm table lamp can lift a dark corner in a living room that doesn't get direct sun. But it introduces a problem that's hard to spot with your eyes and obvious in a photograph: colour temperature clash.
Daylight sits at around 5500K on the colour temperature scale — cool and slightly blue. A standard tungsten bulb is around 2700K — warm and orange. LED spotlights vary wildly depending on the fitting. When you mix these with daylight, the camera records what your brain automatically corrects for: half the room looks blue, the other half looks orange. In a video walkthrough, this mismatch becomes even more obvious as the camera moves between differently lit zones.
The rule of thumb: if a room gets good daylight, turn off artificial lights and let the natural light do the work. If a room is genuinely dark, use lamps sparingly — and ideally ones with bulbs rated close to daylight (5000K–5500K) so the colour temperatures don't fight each other.
Natural light with flash (flambient)
This is what professional property photographers typically use. It sounds counterintuitive, but adding flash to a naturally lit room produces the most natural-looking result. The technique — known in the industry as flambient (flash + ambient) — blends a controlled burst of light with the existing daylight. It lifts shadows, balances the contrast between bright windows and darker corners, and maintains accurate colour throughout the frame.
For Photography, the photographer takes two exposures — one for ambient light, one with flash — and blends them in post-production. For Videography, the approach is different. Video is captured in a single continuous take, so there's no opportunity to blend exposures after the fact. This is why lighting preparation matters even more for video: what the camera sees during the walkthrough is essentially what you get.
The Mood of Light Changes Everything
The same room photographs completely differently at 8am, noon, and 5pm. The quality of light — its warmth, direction, and softness — sets the emotional tone of the image.
Soft morning light is warm and low-angled. It wraps around furniture, creates gentle shadows, and makes bedrooms and living rooms feel inviting. East-facing rooms are at their best during this window, roughly between 8am and 10am in London.
Overcast light is even, diffused, and shadow-free. The cloud cover acts as a giant softbox, spreading light evenly through every window. This is ideal for kitchens, bathrooms, and any space where you want clean, modern, accurate colour. There are no blown-out windows, no hard shadows on worktops, no hot spots on tiled surfaces. Many professional photographers prefer overcast conditions for interiors — the results are more consistent and easier to work with. In London, where overcast skies are the norm for much of the year, this is actually an advantage for property marketing.
Golden hour — the 30 to 60 minutes before sunset — produces the warmest, most atmospheric light. It's best for exteriors, gardens, balconies, and any room with large west-facing windows. Listings photographed during golden hour receive significantly more views than those shot at other times, because the light creates an aspirational, lifestyle quality that flat midday light simply can't match.
Harsh midday sun is the worst scenario for interiors. Direct sunlight creates extreme contrast — blinding white windows next to near-black shadows — that no amount of editing can fully fix. If your shoot is booked for noon on a clear July day, expect the photographer to work harder for a result that would have come naturally at 9am.
Which Way Does Your Property Face?
This is the single most useful thing you can know before booking a shoot. The direction your property faces determines when each room gets its best light — and in London, where terraced streets and neighbouring buildings can block low-angle sun, orientation matters even more than in open suburban areas.
- East-facing rooms — best in the morning (8am–11am). Soft, warm light. Goes flat by afternoon.
- West-facing rooms — best in the afternoon (2pm–5pm). Warm golden light builds through the day.
- South-facing rooms — the most flexible. Good light for most of the day, but avoid direct midday sun in summer.
- North-facing rooms — consistent but cool light. Overcast days are your friend. Consider supplementing with warm-toned lamps in darker corners.
If your property has rooms facing different directions — most do — a good photographer will plan the shooting order to catch each room in its best light. Mention your property's orientation when you book. It's a small detail that makes a measurable difference to the final images.
What You Can Control Before the Shoot
You can't move the sun, but there's plenty you can do to help the light work in your favour:
- Open every curtain and blind fully. Even sheer curtains cut incoming light. Remove them temporarily if possible.
- Clean the windows. It sounds obvious, but dirty glass diffuses light in the wrong way — it reduces brightness without softening shadows.
- Turn off overhead fluorescent lights. Fluorescent tubes cast a green tint that's difficult to correct, especially when mixed with daylight.
- Be selective with lamps. Only use them in corners that genuinely need filling. In a room with good daylight, additional lamps add visual noise, not light.
- Remove objects blocking windows. Plants, ornaments, and furniture pushed against windowsills all reduce the light reaching the room.
- Open internal doors. This matters for Videography especially — it allows light to flow between rooms and creates smoother transitions as the camera moves through the property.
For a full room-by-room preparation guide, see: How to Prepare Your Property for Marketing Photos
Why This Matters More for Video
A photographer can bracket exposures — taking multiple shots at different brightness levels and blending them in post-production. A videographer gets one continuous pass through each room. If the hallway is dark, the kitchen is blown out, and the living room has a green cast from a fluorescent fitting, that's what ends up in the final walkthrough.
Video also exposes colour temperature mismatches more obviously than stills. When the camera moves from a warm-lit living room into a cool-lit kitchen, the shift is jarring. The viewer might not identify it as a lighting problem, but they'll feel it — the space will seem inconsistent, disjointed. A few minutes of preparation — matching bulb temperatures, opening doors, turning off competing light sources — prevents this entirely.
For more on what goes into a professional property video: How to Choose the Right Property Videographer
Ready to get your property's marketing right? Explore our Property Photography and Property Videography services, browse the portfolio to see the difference professional lighting makes, view our pricing, or book a session online and we'll handle the rest.
