Photography For Real Estate

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 »

If you watched Steve Jobs demonstrate the iPad Wednesday you may have noticed while he browsed through the New York Times there was little blue cube on the screen. This is what the iPhone operating system (the iPad uses iPhone OS) displays when it encounters a Flash component on a page. It’s saying, “I don’t know how to display Flash”.

It doesn’t much matter whether you like the iPad or not, it’s pretty clear from the price of the entry level model ($499) the features and huge potential user base that in the very near future, there will be a horde of people using iPads to browse the web. To put it a little differently, if you are a real estate photographer I can guarantee you that by the end of the year you will have clients and home buyers trying to look at your work with an iPad. The key word here is TRYING… They won’t be able to if you stick with Flash only tours and galleries.

If you have Flash tours or Flash galleries on your website they will all just look like the blue cube above on iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads. And if you have 360 tours that use Flash players (most do these days) they will be blue cubes too. Ouch! Continue Reading »

For those that may not have noticed Jeremy Esland’s thread in the PFRE flickr group recently, I think it is worth posting here again. This before and after gallery is from ampimage.com. The owner of the site, Ashley Morrison, specializes in interior and hotel photography. Ashley works with Marie McMillen an interior designer when shooting hotel interiors. While this is technically not real estate photography the concepts are very relevant to shooting and marketing real estate photography.

As Jeremy points out, “…there’s immense educational value in lengthy examination/dissection of these examples“.

From a marketing point of view, this sequence of before and after shots shows that the difference between a casual snapshot and a carefully crafted and staged image is huge. This simple display is a powerful marketing presentation for why a client would want to pay top money for their services.

The other aspect of interior photography that Ashley and Marie’s before and after sequence illustrates is the impact of staging interiors. It is well known that a staged home will sell for more and sell faster than a vacant or unstaged  home and Ashley and Marie’s before and after sequence demonstrates why.

Thanks Ashley and Marie for this great set of examples and thanks to Jeremy Esland for pointing it out.

I’ve been a enthusiastic DropBox user for some time and have been getting comfortable with the convenience of having important files accessible via a special drive in “the cloud”. In a previous post, I described how to use DropBox for photo delivery.

After seeing Leo Laporte’s coverage of some of the new products this year at CES that included a discussion of the newest version of Pogoplug, I decided I had to have one. The prospect of multiple terabytes of storage accessible by any computer on my network, the ability to access those the same files while traveling and the ability to share folders with anyone by sending them an e-mail with a link, all for a one time price of $129 was just to good to pass up. This device raises cloud file storage to a whole new level.

I just finished installing my Pogoplug and it is remarkably simple to install and the features are awesome! Pogoplug gives you pretty much the same functionality as a huge DropBox account for a one-time cost. Here are the significant features: Continue Reading »

Mike Miriello over at RealEstatePhotographyPodcast.com has decided to add a regular Q & A feature to his Podcast and Mike invited me to join him via Skype to discuss answers to questions sent to us via this Q & A form on his site.

The way this will work is you just send us your questions via the Q & A form and every few months when we get enough to do a answer show on the Podcast Mike will schedule a time with you to join us via Skype and discuss our answers. Don’t be bashful, chances are that if you have a question many others have the same question too. I’ve added a link to the Q & A form for the Podcast on the right side-bar under “Other Links”.

So to participate in the Podcast you’ll need a free Skype account. For those not familiar with Skype, it allows you to do free “phone calls” to anyone else that has a Skype account using the audio and video facilities of your computer. It’s easy and very cool!

Oh by the way, if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the Real Estate Photography Podcast through iTunes or you can listen to just the episodes you want over at RealEstatePhotographyPodcast.com.

Clark Dugger just sent me a link to an article in the LA Times today by James Rainey, titled “For photographers and graphic artists, not a pretty picture out there“.

To me it feels like this article is written from the point of view of someone that has spent their career in print media and now finds their job working for “big media” threatened. Yes, the Internet is the huge game changer of our era and is being felt in all businesses that have not embraced the “new rules” of the Internet. I submit that the opportunities it exposes out weigh the problems it creates. I’m not saying it’s easy to figure out and adapt to these new rules and flattening of the world that the Internet has created. I’m saying for those willing to adapt to the new rules the opportunities are significant. Continue Reading »

Today I did a phone interview with Alison Rogers of CBS MoneyWatch.com for a blog post that she just put up on the Ask the Agent blog on the CBS MoneyWatch blog.

This was one of those interviews that you don’t get to choose the questions, but I love having any opportunity to get the real estate photography word out to a broader community. I believe the readership of this site is buyers and agents.

It’s interesting what attracts people to do these sort of things. Alison apparently attracted by the comments that I made in the post last week about the Realtor.com and how agents and real estate photographers should think about photo presentation on Realtor.com. Not really what I expected, but whatever works. I think I’m going to work this year to get more media coverage to real estate photography. Thanks Alison for the coverage.

Sometimes when you are doing marketing copy being painfully honest is the best approach. This marketing copy is brilliantly simple and unforgettable.

This little commercial is a kick, but it’s just the “tip of the iceberg”. This commercial was done by Rhett and Link over at ilovelocalcommercials.com. These two guys show the power of a video camera and great ideas.

I’m sure there is an opportunity here to adapt this simple style to selling real estate or promoting a real estate agent.

Thanks to Michael at naturalight.us for the link to this video.

I noticed that Reator.com released a iPhone app yesterday and downloaded it and used the app to browse through all the listings in the neighborhood I thought I’d take a look at the Realtor.com site directly. Since we quit using Realtor.com in about 2004 I’d not looked at Realtor.com for a very long while.

I was amazed by the relatively unusual layout the site now has. On Realtor.com the majority of listings that I looked at used just 4 landscape photos in a square. You can have more than four photos but I see why hardly anyone does. The four photo layout makes a very strong presentation. Listings that have any photos in portrait mode look awful. In almost 100 listings I paged through I saw no tour links. The lack of tours is probably because Realtor.com charges an extra fee for posting tours.

There are several problems that can occur with the Realtor.com layout. Portrait mode photos are a disaster. They look awful. And if any of the four primary photos are sized a little wrong the nice symmetrical white space that separates the photos goes all wacky.

This little Realtor.com tour reminded me of why it’s important to spend time studying the site you are going to display your listing photos on. This kind of geeky presentation analysis of how photos are displayed is something that very few agents are going to do. I think it’s something that real estate photographers should be doing. Here are the kind of things I mean: Continue Reading »

The holidays  are wearing off and it’s hard to avoid the fact that it’s time to start engaging again.

In the real estate world it’s still a relatively quiet time that’s perfect for education, reflecting and planning.

At this time of the year I always like to spend some time reviewing what things I did last year worked and what things didn’t work. Figuring out what worked frequently boils down to having some way of knowing which marketing technique working. I find that a fantastic way to understand your marketing is a simple customer discussion.

This discussion with our listing customers and our listing buyers was what got me so involved in real estate photography in the beginning. Understanding why we got a listing was always pretty easy and frequently it was because a neighbor would see the marketing (flyer or virtual tour address on the for sale sign) we did to sell a home near them. I love to go to inspections of our listings just so I can talk to the buyers and ask them “how did you find this listing”.  To me the underlying question is, “which part of our marketing is working?” After a few years of this kind of questioning of our listing customers and buyers the central role of photography was unmistakeable and striking.

As a real estate photographer here are some discussions you can have with your customers that will improve your business in 2010: Continue Reading »

A couple of days ago Milia Campbell (TulipChain Photography and TulipChain flickr handle) pointed out to me that we should have a separate flickr group for HDR and Blending in real estate so that all the there would be a separate place to post and discuss HDR and Blended images.

As you know if you’ve been hanging around PFRE for any time, HDR and blending are hugely popular in real estate photography. So this seemed like a great idea. As of a couple of days ago there is a new real estate photography flickr group called “HDR/Blending for real estate“. Milia and I are co-administrators of the group and so far the concept appears to be popular. The group is up to 4o members in the first two days. Go check it out. And thanks to Milia having and acting on this great idea!

I also noticed that Milia has some useful HDR tutorials on her blog that are worth checking out.

Thanks to Clark Dugger for passing along the link to this very beautiful, poetic, Full CG animated piece that “tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.” It’s very abstract but has many sequences that are wonderful. For more details check Alex’s site.

After roughly four weeks of beta testing we are as of today (Wed, Jan 6) expanding the PFREtour.com beta test to a wider audience. The next 100 people to sign-up (click here to sign-up) will be accepted and given a free tour. After we get 100 more people signed up we’ll not be accepting any more accounts for about a week.

By about mid-January we will be able to post tours on Realtor.com (PicturePath support) and be syndicating tours to some of the major real estate web sites.

We are planning to officially launch PFREtour.com and completely open it up for everyone to use during the last week of January. By that time we will have most of the initial features added.

Just before I posted this, I  let everyone that previously requested a beta invitation know that we are now opening the site up for a second, wider round of testing so those folks would be first in line for this beta expansion.

We are getting great feedback from beta testers and will be prioritizing new features based on what beta testers tell us is most important to them. Thanks to everyone that’s participating in helping us build a great tour product designed for real estate photographers.