Archive for March, 2007

What About Photoshop CS3?

March 28th, 2007

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 [...]

An Elegant Image by M. James Northen

March 26th, 2007

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 [...]

How Host Your Own Virtual Tours

March 17th, 2007

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. [...]

HDR Image Processing with Photomatix

March 13th, 2007

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 [...]

Follow-up on Barrel Correction with DxO Optics Pro

March 13th, 2007

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 [...]

Zigview Remote View finder and Trigger for Mast Shots

March 13th, 2007

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 [...]

DVD Tours from www.dvd-tour.com

March 9th, 2007

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 [...]

16-9.net Lens Tests

March 9th, 2007

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. [...]

How To Prevent Curved Walls

March 6th, 2007

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 [...]

What Real Estate Photographers Should Do When They Go To Realtor Meetings

March 5th, 2007

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 [...]

Staging, Styling and Good Marketing Photography

March 4th, 2007

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; [...]

#1 Real Estate Photo Distraction: Converging Verticals

March 2nd, 2007

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 [...]