Reading a listing photo: what a wide lens is hiding

We shoot our own listings and we use a wide lens, because at 35mm you cannot photograph a Boston bedroom from inside it. Every brokerage in this market does the same. The lens is not the problem. Not knowing you are looking through one is.

How to spot the stretch

Look at the vertical lines nearest the edge of the frame. A door frame that leans away from the center, a radiator that reads two feet long, a sofa whose far arm looks smaller than the near one: that is 16mm doing its work. The middle of the picture stays honest, and the edges are where the room grows.

Then find the ceiling. If it appears in every shot of a room, the photographer was standing in a doorway shooting across, which is how a nine-foot square bedroom photographs like a study.

What the set leaves out

• The street. If there is no photo looking out of the front windows, look up the address on a map before you drive over.
• The back of the building, where the fire escape, the bins and the parking actually are.
• Any room the floor plan lists and the photographs skip. A three-bed with seven photos is a three-bed with a room somebody chose not to show.
• The ceiling height in the basement, which is the difference between storage and a room.
• Where the sun is. A listing photographed at noon in July tells you nothing about February at four o'clock.

The measurement that settles it

Every listing on this site prints square footage, and the floor plan prints room dimensions. Take the number, not the picture. A bedroom under 100 square feet holds a double bed and one small chest, whatever the photograph is doing at the edges of the frame.

At the viewing, carry a tape measure and the dimensions of the two pieces of furniture you refuse to part with. Half our buyers do this on the second visit. The ones who do it on the first visit see more houses.