Photography For Real Estate

Wow, the new photomerge feature in Photoshop CS3 is a huge improvement compared to previous versions of photomerge. The idea of photomerge is to stitch together a series of photos into a panorama similar to the panorama above. I made this panorama from six overlapping shots that cover about 180 degrees of horizontal view. [...]

You may have noticed that when M. James Northen was describing his process for shooting the image we featured about a month ago he mentioned that he used a Expodisc. If you are not familiar with with the Expodisc, Ken Rockwell has a great article on the subject. Basically it’s a filter like device that [...]

Yesterday Jim Dhaem over at www.dvd-tour.com pointed out to me that Lurch (Carel Struycken) is a VR photographer in Southern California. Check out his work at the following sites:
His VR site: www.sphericalpanoramas.com
His Virtual Tour site: www.sphericalvrtours.com
His acting site: www.carelstruycken.com
Thanks Jim.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about shooting exterior photos at twilight. Recently Cherie Irwin a RE photographer who works out of St Louis, MO was showing me some of her twilight shots and remarking how much the her client liked the photos. The shot above is my favorite of the series that Cherie [...]

Jason Soles commenting in the last post poses a great question: “Does anybody (photographers or agents) have/use some sort of written code-of-ethics for these situations?” Since as a RE photographer you are working for the REALTORS® I think  the NAR ethics should set the ethical guideline.
As a  REALTORS® I knew that the National [...]

Drew from NJ just pointed out an interesting recent article on yahoo.com/real estate by Vanessa Richardson of Bankrate.com titled- Altered Photos: Taking the Real From Real Estate.
The article bottom line is that according to John O’Brien Chairman of the Illinois state Real Estate Lawyer Association:
“Advertising is held to be boasting and bragging, not [...]

Recently a company called RealPix announced a point and shoot style camera designed for Realtors. I has 22mm fixed focus lens, 640×480 pixel resolution, “high-powered” built-in flash all for $299. It is expected to ship in July.
Reviews at this point are mixed. Darren Murph at Engadget is not impressed. Nor is Wired’s Gadget Lab.
In my [...]

Photography for Real Estate blog is starting it’s 3rd year of publication tomorrow. For the first year I posted very irregularly but this last year I’ve been posting more regularly. This is the 201st post. Readership has reached an average of around 1500 unique readers per week.
I want to thank all the readers of this [...]

Ed Parsons of Myrtle Beach, SC (www.photoshowstudios.com) sent me an example of his Interactive Home Showcase for a recent client. This virtual tour has several things I want to comment on.
The first is that it’s an example of a Flash slide-show created by the program www.sellfolio.com which is a bunch of Flash templates that you [...]

After my post about Photomatrix I wanted to make sure beginning real estate photographers know that there are other, better ways to deal with the problem of shooting in a situation where the brightness range is more than you camera can handle. Ideally you want to get the darkness of the sky and still get [...]

Have you noticed Adobe Album Starter Edition? I frankly don’t even know how I got Adobe Album Starter Edition 3.0 on my machine. It could have been when I installed Lightroom 1.0 or when I installed Photoshop Elements 5.0. I think I even removed it once since I didn’t recognize it or know where it [...]

Bruce Vinal of Aerial Perspectives reports that he just got a job photographing a $9.5 million estate directly as a result of being listed in the Real Estate Photographer Directory.If you want to be listed in the directory leave me your contact information  as a comment at: www.larrylohrman.wordpress.com/re-photographer-directory . If you are a Realtor looking [...]

Earlier today I was talking to a Realtor about where the line is for how much photo-editing it’s OK to do on a marketing image. I’ve done a post on this subject before over a year ago but I think it is worth re-visiting. The composite image above shows an image that I modified [...]

Click photo to see examples

I want to highlight an important tip raised recently in comments by Cherie Irwin and Scott Hargis. Last week Cherie sent me some examples of the same image shot from different heights above the floor (see Cherie’s examples above). Cherie pointed out that she’d been viewing some interior images shot by [...]