Photography For Real Estate

As a small business owner you want to do everything you can to project a professional appearance. Your e-mail address that your clients see is one way of projecting that professional appearance.

For example, the email address john@doephotography.com projects a more professional appearance than john341@yahoo.com. How do you get a professional looking e-mail?

1. Buy a domain name and do business under that name: If you have a unusual last name like Lohrman you may be able to purchase a domain name (lohrman.com) the same as your last name. If you have a more common name like my wife you many have to purchase the domain name that is a derivative of your name like Thomas Grubba  (tgrubbaphoto.com.com). You shouldn’t pay more than about $9 per year for domain registration. Many hosting services throw in the domain registration for free when you host a site.
2. Choose a hosting service that provides mail service: All good website hosting services these days provide mail servers with site hosting. My favorite is bluehost.com where I host this blog. I costs $6.95/month and they throw in the domain name that’s free forever and the ability to have 2500 different e-mail addresses like larry at lohrman.com or info@lohrman.com, etc. Another good hosting service for photographers is www.foliolink.com. They provide a variety of template sites for photographers. Continue Reading »
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Doug Cranmer in Chicago gave me some details of his recent success with his listing in the PFRE Real Estate Photographer Directory. Doug says:

“I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know that my investment in the PFRE Real Estate Photographer Directory paid off very well. A Chicago Realtor did a Google search for “real estate photographer” and found the directory on photographyforrealestate.net. Continue Reading »

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Back in January of this year we asked for you help in finding a marrow donor for Realtor Scott Kleiman. Susanne Hayek just reported that a donor has been found for Scott. Susanne says:

A donor for Scott has been found! All we know is that she is a young (20 something) woman from overseas. She and Scott have passed all the physical tests and the marrow donation will be happening this month. Scott wants to thank everyone for signing up at the National Marrow Donor Program and making this possible… more than 500 people signed up at his website. It was unprecedented!

Note that those that signed up with the National Marrow Donor Program that were not a match for Scott will stay on file to be donors for someone that they do match.

I get asked this question all the time and there are an amazing number of Google searches this site catches with these question as the search term.

Of coarse there is no simple answer. The answer depends on your budget and what kind of DSLR body you have. I use to have a real estate camera table that listed a number of choices for real estate cameras. But I discontinued it about a year ago because it had a bunch of point-and-shoot cameras on the list and I wanted to stop recommending any point and shoot cameras. I’ve decided to build a list of DSLRs and a list of wide-angle lenses. In keeping with my theory that your wide-angle glass is the most important piece of equipment a real estate photographer owns I’ve started to build a wide-angle lens table first.

Each lens has a link to check the price and I’d like to give the lens a rating link in the center column but I have to find way to give all the lenses in the list a rating. This may be a mixture of lens rating sites… haven’t decided yet. My goal is to bring together all the information one needs to know to make an intelligent decision on which wide-angle lens to buy.

The plugin I use to display the most recent photos posted to the PFRE flickr group broke for no apparent reason so I’ve had to change to a slightly different plugin. As a result when you click on one of the photos it displays that photo instead of the whole PFRE flickr photo-stream as before. If you want to go the whole photo-stream use the link above the photos labeled “Photo Discussion”. If I can figure out what went wrong and fix it I’ll go back to the old plugin.

This afternoon Scott Hargis, Thomas Grubba, Ron Kenny and I had a telecon to discuss the next steps in putting on workshops similar to the PFRE Seattle workshop we had in Seattle on April 25.

During the telecon we made the following decisions: Continue Reading »

Since we are on the subject of lighting I’ll point out one of the classic books books on lighting. This is one of those books that you will keep coming back to again and again. I first became aware of it a year or so ago from reading strobist.com because David referred to it as the “Gold standard” of lighting.

This book does not talk specifically about lighting interiors; it’s more at the level of general lighting principles. As a summary says, “This is not your typical how-to-book! This is a tried-and-true how to understand book. How to understand and predict the size of light, types of reflections, and the family of angles. Master these principles and you can shoot any portrait, any surface, anywhere!”

“No matter how smart your digital camera is, its lighting is hit-or-miss at best. That’s still a job for your eyes and brain. Lighting is worth the effort to learn well– there is no other skill that can improve your photography so much, so quickly.”

I want talk about lighting choices for real estate photography. Lighting is probably the biggest challenge for those starting out in real estate photography. There isn’t any one right way to light interiors. I’ve seen beautiful images made with each of these techniques. What I see and hear after talking to hundreds of real estate photographers is a gravitation to one technique or another based on where in the photographic process you’d rather spend your time. If you want to minimize the amount of post processing time you end up using 3 or 4 and if you are OK with more post processing you gravitate towards 6. Frequently, beginning real estate photographers will use 1 or 2 and progress to other techniques as the gain experience:

1. Available light: Just a tripod using the lights coming in the windows and interior lights. Pros: simplicity (not much to learn), excellent results if inside and outside brightness close. Cons: only way to control window brightness is by time of day, frequently dark corners and uneven brightness. Continue Reading »
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Ron Kenny (captainronsphotos) discussed an idea for using the flickr discussion group for reviewing home shoots at the Seattle workshop. The basic idea is that it would be nice to use the flickr discussion group to get more eyes on all the photos from a shoot you are about to send to a client. An easy format for doing this is to just upload the finished photos to flickr and create a set. Then start a discussion thread and put a pointer to your set you want reviewed in the thread. Continue Reading »

I’ve talked to and met a number of people recently that are just getting started in real estate photography. Many of their questions center around what equipment and software do you need to get started. Here is my current recommendation assuming that you want to spend as little as possible:

• Body: Canon XT or Nikon D40 - about $450 - Don’t get the 18-55mm kit lens unless you are going to use it for something other than real estate photography.
• Wide-angle lens: Sigma 10-20mm ultra wide lens - $479 - If you are getting a Canon body and can afford it go for the Canon 10-22mm lens - it’s a gem but its closer to $700. If you are getting Nikon body go for the Nikon 12-24mm if you can afford around $900.
• Flash: Canon 580 EXII or Nikon SB-800 - Get the same brand as your body.
• Photo-editor: Adobe Lightroom - $299
• Straighting Vertical and correcting barrel distortion: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 - $79 at Costco. Continue Reading »
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