Photography For Real Estate

I’ve promised several readers that I would update my popular two year old post that talks about what the important considerations are for choosing best entry level camera for real estate photography. Here are what I think are the most important considerations:

1. Consider ultra wide-angle glass first: For real estate photography the range of effective focal lengths you will want is between 16mm and 24mm. Understand that low-end DSLRs have a 1.5 (Nikon) or 1.6 (Canon) multiplier effect on the focal lengths.
2. Consider how you will be lighting: If you are going to use flash lighting how are you going to trigger your flashes? Optical? If you are going to use HDR or Exposure Fusion you’ll want to be able to shoot a bracket of -2EV, 0EV, +2EV.
3. Don’t purchase “kit” lenses unless you are going to use them for something other than real estate. Kit lens (typically in the 18-35mm range (28.8-56mm effective focal length on a Canon body) are not wide enough for real estate.
4. Consider used equipment for sale online: Check craigslist.org or ebay.com or amazon.com for used equipment.
5. Consider if you to want to look professional: If you are shooting real estate professionally and you show up with a $300 point-and-shoot camera agents will think, “gee, if this doesn’t take any special equipment I should do this myself”. I heard a Joe McNally interview where Joe says he doesn’t shoot big important jobs with small flashes because it doesn’t look as professional as big studio lights.

Given these considerations I think there are several obvious least cost equipment choices: Continue Reading »

In case you are thinking about purchasing a Canon 5D MkII or 7D Canon has some instant rebates that are effective through April 3, 2010 that you should look at. Here is the link to Canon’s current promotions.

It looks like you can save about $250 if you purchase a 5DMkII, 16-35mm wide-angle zoom and a 580 EX II Flash. Not a huge thing but every little bit helps.

Scott Hargis just put up a post on his blog that has a stunning example of extreme real estate marketing that is worth taking a look at. Scott gives the behind the scenes story of a project he worked on with Quentin Bacon and others. The total marketing involved a video, aerials, and stills.

My wife (a 25 year Realtor) and I were viewing Quentin’s video and the counter-point, red-neck real estate video that Scott sites and commenting on the fact that with Quentin’s life-style video there is really nothing of any significance that the Realtor can add by being in the video talking. Her insight was that the reason you DON’T want the Realtor in the video talking is you want the potential buyer to make their own personal interpretation of what they see in the video. Marketing a property is about getting the potential buyer to project or visualize themselves in the property. Quentin’s life-style approach with simply great images and a light audio track is an effective way of doing exactly that. A Realtor in the video pointing out that “this is the kitchen” is a total distraction from what you want to be doing with marketing.

Thanks Scott for the outstanding post and examples!

Peter Meo recently pointed out to me that I’ve never talked about negotiating agency contracts on the blog. He’s right. These kind of contracts are not all that common and I’ve never been directly involved in one. So I consulted Mike Miriello (Mike does the RealEstatePhotographyPodcast) and Thomas Grubba. Mike has an exclusive shooting contract with a company in Virginia and Thomas has an exclusive contract with Pacific Union Real Estate and a non-exclusive contract with Empire Realty in the Oakland, CA area.

What is an Agency Shooting Contract?
This is where a real estate photographer enters into a contract with a agency (real estate company) to shoot some number of listings per year. In return for a guaranteed level of business from the agency, the photographer gives the agency a discount on the price of each shoot. This kind of arrangement is a win for all parties. The photographer gets a guaranteed level of business, the agency raises the level of their marketing and the agents get a price break on good photography for their listings.

Agency Shooting Contracts are Not for Everyone
I think before you try getting an agency contract you need to be in demand by top agents. Your demand in the office you are negotiating with will help you in the negotiation. On the other hand, if you already have a large customer base and you are already shooting 400 or more shoots a year then an agency contract may not for you. Oh, yea, with these kind of contracts you probably need someone to back you up so you can take time off now and then.

Key Items to Negotiate Continue Reading »

Rusty Freeman sent me this amazing real estate photography story this morning. This exterior shot of a San Clemente listing that Rusty shot for Realtor Jerry Barbanell listed at $4.3 million allegedly sold the home in 30 minutes.

Here’s the whole story told by the listing agent Jerry Barbanell. “The buyer came with his agent to see the home, beach front property, you know buyers, well not really sure, but was interested. It is now Saturday morning, at the buyer is at home, as he sits down with his coffee, opens up the Real Estate section of the morning newspaper, and BAM , here is a full page photo of the home he wants to purchase, the one he saw only a day prior. WOW, he thinks to himself, this home look’s fantastic, with this photo, that “darn” listing agent is going to sell this home this weekend. To which, he pick’s up his cell phone call’s his agent, “make an offer”, right now before anyone else see’s this home. Jerry sold the home 30 minutes into the Saturday morning edition of Orange County Register. Did our twilight image sell this home, well Jerry thinks so. Great Photography, does sell homes, just ask one of our satisfied Realtor clients, Jerry.”

Here is Rusty’s description of the technical details of this shot: “The image is a twilight “blue zone” photo, as the base image, taken during a 10 minute window after sunset,  then compiled with about 10 photoshop layers of individual flashed images with a studio strobe, being fired every ten feet while my assistant walked down the street, held the flash, fired, walked out of camera another ten feet, fired.  Photoshop was blended layers by our staff wizard RAF, into the image seen.  Camera was a Canon 5D, base image set on AV, aperture f/18, ISO400, the flash cycle images, manual 200, ISO 400, aperture f/7.1, lens was a Canon 16-35m F/2.8.  This was a fast image, not much done to the base image, a few lights are blown out on the garage, but overall the image is good quality for a brochure or front page of the Real Estate Section of our local county newspaper, Orange County Register.  This is our typical MLS Twilight image.

Thanks Rusty for the story. Keep up the good work! Sounds like you’ve turned Jerry into a regular customer.

We’ve decided that PFREtour.com is ready to move out of the Beta testing mode so we will be launching it officially on Monday March 22. Alfie and Michael, the PFREtour developers, have been working hard to fix problems and add new features.

We want to formally thank the over 100 beta users for all their feedback and suggestions. I want to highlight just a couple PFREtour.com tours that are already being used market properties:

• 9902 Little Gasparilla Island FL
• Beachfront Rancho Santa Cruz, La Pastora, Baja Mexico
• 555 West 23rd St #S11M, NY

Since January 6 we have added the following features: Continue Reading »

It was October of 2007 when I launched the Photography For Real Estate e-book. Since that time it’s been very clear that the e-book medium is a great way to help beginning real estate photographers learn the craft and business of real estate photography. I get a huge amount of feedback from e-book purchasers that the books are doing what they are designed to to.

A PFRE e-book is a life time subscription to learning about real estate photography. That is, after you purchase one you get all future updates. However, getting future updates depends on keeping the e-mail address associated with your original purchase since that’s the only way I have of sending you future updates.

Since I started publishing e-books they have gotten a lot more popular because of Amazon’s kindle. Amazon claims to have sold more e-books during the last quarter of 2009 than it sold hardcopy books. Later this year the iPad will add another dimension books to the e-book medium. PFRE e-books are currently distributed just in PDF form because that’s still the most useful form that works on all platforms. However, I’m going to be watching the evolution of e-books on the iPad and doing what is necessary to make sure that PFRE e-books work well on the iPad. I have no idea what that means at this point.

I’m currently working on the following PFRE e-book updates that will occur some time in 2010:

1. Updates to Photography For Real Estate: There will be updates to the hardware chapter, the HDR chapter, the workflow chapter and a new chapter on video for real estate photography.
2. Updates to The Business of Real Estate Photography: There will be updates to the “deciding what to charge” chapter and a bunch of updates to chapters that have to do with marketing. I want to organize the strategy and tactics that we all are learning about how to survive in this recessionary economy.

I am also in the process of working on partnering with other authors to publish a wider variety of real estate photography e-books.

As we announced back in January Mike Miriello over at RealEstatePhotographyPodcast.com and I are doing a regular (when ever we get enough questions for a 30 to 45 minute session) Q and A podcast session. This session was our first. Be sure to send us your questions via the Q and A form.

The questions Mike and I discuss this episode are:

1-How to convince agents that photography is worthwhile and worth the cost?

3-Would you recommend processing your photos in PTLens before processing them in Photomatix?

Apple’s recent release of Aperture 3.0 highlight’s the fact that photographers that are Mac users are faced with a choice of do they use Adobe Lightroom or Aperture for digital asset and workflow management.

I want to disclose right up front that I am a Mac user and I use Lightroom extensively and Aperture only occasionally. I use Aperture primarily because I cover it in my e-books and am interested in being able to give sound, unbiased advice in the area of workflow.

I don’t intend to do a feature by feature comparison (others have already done that) but rather raise some of the general issues and considerations that Mac photographers should use to help make the decision of which is best for them personally. Here are some of the issues to consider if you find yourself trying to decide between Lightroom and Aperture: Continue Reading »

McAllen,TX Realtor, Lee Jinks pointed out to me that the newly announced FinePix HS10 would be a great camera for real estate shooting. Indeed, it does! It seems like the toughest thing to find in compact cameras is a wide enough lens. The HS10 has a 24mm, effective, lens; very workable for shooting interiors.  In addition, it has all of the other features that I consider essential for a compact camera that I’d recommend to a Realtor or beginning real estate photographer that can’t afford a DSLR and ultra-wide-angle lens:

1. Hot shoe
2. RAW mode
3. HD video (well, maybe not essential)
4. Manual mode

In addition to these essential real estate photography shooting features the HS10 has some other amazing features like:

1. 30X optical zoom from 24-720mm and it’s a manual zoom for better and faster control.
2. 10fps high speed shooting for action shots.
3. 1000fps high speed movie mode.
4. 1080p video with stereo sound.
5. Some cool in camera features like motion remover and motion panorama.
6. Apparently, good low-light performance.

All of these features for $499. The HS10 will ship in March 2010. It’s available for pre-ordering now at Amazon.

I’m continually amazed by what Moore’s Law continues to do to compact cameras!

“What should I charge?”, is probably the most asked question by beginning real estate photographers.

The answer to the what to charge question has two parts:

1. How much on the average does it cost you to show-up to any property in your territory?
2. How much should you charge as an hourly rate?

How much to show-up? Anyone in the business of driving around to properties in these days of rising transportation costs needs to be keeping track of vehicle costs and reviewing them frequently. Figure more than just fuel costs. You need to include auto insurance and vehicle replacement costs. Here is a great site to help you calculate vehicle costs.

What is your hourly rate? This is a tougher question. But you know what hourly rate you’ve been paid in other jobs. The difference when you are working for yourself is you need to figure out what accountants call a “burdened” rate. That is, a rate that includes paying for marketing, health insurance, camera equipment, retirement and all the other costs of making this a long term sustainable job.

What’s the competition charging? It goes without saying that knowing what the competition is doing is always an important part of the what to charge question. Take care when doing this. You have to also compare the competition’s services. Studying the competition’s prices and offerings needs to be a regular exercise. Continue Reading »

I did a post last August on HDR Studio when unifiedcolor.com released their Windows only version.

They recently released a Mac version and temporally reduced their price from $149 to $99.

I’ve downloaded the 30 day trial version and have been using it for a few days. I have to say there is much to like about HDR Studio. It seems to generate less noise during processing so final images don’t tend to have that slightly foggy look as they do some times in Photomatix. Of coarse this ultimately results in less or no time in Lightroom or Photoshop after the HDR processing. It also seems to be easier to produce a more realistic looking image with HDR Studio (this could be seen as a plus or minus depending on your tastes).

To me, the biggest problem HDR Studio is going to have gaining traction is that it’s regular price is $50 more than the industry standard (Photomatix) but the good news is that through the end of February it’s the same price as Photomatix. I think at the same price as Photomatix it is a good choice for photographers that are going for the realistic look.

Thanks to David Lenhert for sending me this link to a beautifully done time-lapse by the David and Dan Newcomb  and the Interlife Project, of Vancover, BC.

Vancouver is a beautiful city and is coming to life right now because the 2010 Winter Olympics that start Feb 12 in Vancouver and Whistler, which is the  my all time favorite place to ski. This video is full of all the iconic shots of Vancouver. Be sure to watch it in full-screen 1080p HD for maximum impact!

I am particularly aware of the epic amount of work that went into a 4:57 minute time-lapse like this since I’ve been shooting a lot of time-lapse video recently. I’m still working at creating time-lapse with no flicker or jerkiness. These kind of time-lapse sequences are taken with a still camera shooting a frame every 2 seconds or so. So 5 minutes of 24 FPS video is a compilation of about 7200 still frames. I’ve been using the Beta Lightroom 3.0 to process my time-lapse sequences. Lightroom 3.0 has a feature that you can select all the images in a sequence that you want in a video and it will create a MP4 video of the whole sequence. Lightroom is a natural place to create time-lapse video since you are able to do image adjustments and sync them to every image in a sequence before creating the video.

This last week I talked to two real estate photographers that have built area listing sites designed to reach home sellers with the message that good photography helps to sell homes ( John Quarles in the Birmingham, AL area and Dan Abraham in the Prince George, BC area). Area listing sites list part or all of the listings in specific area the photographer is working in.

This approach of area real estate sites run by photographers was a new one for me since I’ve not seen it done in the real estate markets that I’m familiar with. In the Seattle area buyers and sellers primarily frequent the big broker sites (Windermere, John L Scott, Coldwellbanker etc.) and increasingly sites like Zillow and Redfin that are beginning to be very high traffic sites. I’ve talked about how marketing directly to home sellers is a great approach because they will insist that agents use good photography if they understand how important it is. But the trick is to reach the home sellers without alienating the agents involved. An area web site does that nicely.

The underlying idea of an area listing site is simple and makes perfect sense: Continue Reading »