Are you entering your home in the Fall Color Contest? We hope so! (ATSF recently posted some pointers on photographing your home)Seeing how other people live and discovering how they've solved their home challenges is incredibly inspiring. We appreciate the courage of everyone who's ever opened up their home to us. Inviting people into your home to have it photographed for posterity, and the scrutiny of strangers can be challenging. The camera often sees things that the eyes miss...
Use Your Camera To Declutter Your Home
Even if your own home is not quite house tour ready, you can harness it's objectivity to help you clean and declutter your home. In a picture, that grouping on the coffee table is revealed to be a cluttered mess; it might be time to thin it out. The yellow lamp that you were considering dumping is a bright spot amid a sea of blue upholstery; balancing it out with a bright orange pillow might bring it more into focus. And, that neat arrangement in the corner? Not so neat after all. Try it. Snap some photos and take a good look at them. And, if by chance you'd like to share your home with us, whether via a house tour, entering the Fall Colors Contest, or a good question, we'd love it!
[image: Ben's Midcentury Mecca]
Comments (8)
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Good advice. It's the same with hearing a recording of yourself talking -- you can better hear small idiosyncrasies of speech that you may not otherwise have been aware of.
view lightspeed's profile
it's so true. i stick articles to walls near the spot where i'm considering the idea and forget to take them down for months. photos help me "see" them.
view Lady J's profile
this is kind of funny: I think I would have said that the camera makes things look cluttered which in three dimensions look just fine. but I completely agree that the camera (or even just the viewfinder) helps give a fresh perspective on the faults we've ceased noticing in our own homes. it's like seeing everything through someone else's eyes. (I'm not going on a diet just so that I can look ten pounds lighter for the camera, though!)
view deidrel's profile
I really need to adopt this technique. My boyfriend and I have been living with the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality for the last year and we've finally got the furniture arranged how we like it... only now we're stuck figuring out what to do with the clutter that was hidden so well.
Time for a photoshoot!
view revolution9's profile
this is SO true... i sent in a photo of my kitchen and everyone screamed about the clutter on my cabinet tops, which once i uploaded the images i myself noticed.
view DahliaCactus's profile
Also, you can take pictures of stuff you feel connected to but don't really want to keep (mom's pewter collection?)
Those files take up almost no room on your hard drive.
view barbara's profile
The picture trick works. You really do see all sorts of problems that you might otherwise not detect. I have added one more wrinkle to the process: I flip the picture so it's a mirror image of the actual room. This forces you to look at the room objectively as you will mentally read the picture as an entirely different space.
view RichardinLA's profile
Its so much easier to photoshop out the clutter than cleaning it up for reals :P
view msjessiemeghan's profile