Photography For Real Estate

Since Photoshop 3 I’ve been one of the first in line to upgrade my version of Photoshop. This time it feels different to me. I’ve been using the Beta Photoshop CS3 on one machine and I have to say I like the feel of the new Bridge but I haven’t run into a CS3 feature [...]

I was recently looking through the images on M. James Northen’s web site after he’s made a comment on photographing upper-end properties. M. James works out of Vero Beach, Florida an shoots for premiere real estate companies, multi-million dollar builders, custom cabinet and kitchen designers and interior decorators in the southeast Florida area.
I chose this [...]

Cherie Irwin mentioned that “…I’m not a Virtual Tour provider, but I am curious about what kind of options there are for building your own tours, hosting them and then posting to Realtor.com through their Picture Path program, without using a Big Box Virtual Tour provider or hosting program.”
Hosting your own tours is not difficult. [...]

I’ve been having an interesting discussion with my friend Kevin Caskey about HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing of spherical panoramas. Kevin is a photographic savvy Realtor in Bellevue, WA that shoots his own spherical panoramas. Kevin discovered and pointed out Photomatix software to me. He showed me his QuickTime VR panorama of his living room [...]

Here’s follow up on the subject of correcting lens defects. My “curved wall” article I did recently was intended to highlight the issue of curved walls caused by barrel distortion. Many beginning RE photographers don’t seem to understand this subject. Several comments brought up the fact that there are more lens defects than just barrel [...]

Scott Hargis pointed out an interesting little piece of gadgetry. The Zigview S2 lets you plug a remote viewer with a 40′  extension into the eye-piece of many digital SLRs. This looks like an easy way to put you camera on a long monopod or mast. It looks to me like this remote viewer and [...]

Today I got 2 DVDs in the mail from Jim DHaem over at www.dvd-tour.com. Jim offered to make me a demo of his DVD making service. So I just e-mailed him 20 photos of a listing that just closed last week and he created a DVDs slide-show complete with Ken Burns style panning over the [...]

I want to highlight another contribution by Marc Lacoste, of Nantes, FR. Marc has pointed out a number of very significant items of interest to readers of this blog. His comment on the last post that referrers to the wide-angle lens tests on www.16-9.net . These tests are a real gem! Very detailed and complete. [...]

Another common mistake Realtors make with marketing photos is to use images in which the walls don’t appear to be straight. Inexpensive wide-angle will lens and converters have what is called barrel distortion. That is, distortion will make straight lines near the edges of the frame look curved.

Why Not Having Perfectly Vertical Straight Walls is [...]

I’ve mentioned before that one of the best ways to get clients is to attend Realtor meetings. All offices have a sales meeting about once a week. If you call the managing broker they will usually let you come make a presentation to all the agents in the office. Better yet get a Realtor that [...]

I like to look through the Wall Street Journals real estate site occasionally to see the upper-end homes that are marketed in their home of the week feature. Considering that these homes are moving slowly these days (Ben Casselman reports that only 14 of the 46 these homes of the week have sold in 2006; [...]

I did a post last April on this subject but this is such an important subject that it needs to be raised over and over. This time I’ve done a longer article on the subject in PDF form so Realtors can easily pass it around. In the complete article (link at the bottom of this [...]