Photography For Real Estate

A discussion going on in the Flickr PhotographyForRealEstate discussion brought to my attention that other Lightroom users are going through the same evaluation of Barrel distortion and vertical fixing that I’m going through after my recent addition of a MacBook Pro to my tools.
Here’s the problem:
If you are a Lightroom user you need an application [...]

Susanne Hayek sent me a great suggestion for a product to market to your Realtor clients as closing gifts. Susanne says she uses mypublisher.com to make beautifully printed coffee table style books. These books also work nicely as an elegant way to present your portfolio of images. Another similar site that a portrait photographer [...]

First of all I need to point out that this is Scott Hargis’s post. Like many of you I’ve been admiring the way Scott uses a hand full of strobes to light a room to look like an Architectural Digest shoot and still keep the time to shoot a hole home within a few [...]

Do your clients think they own the photos that you shoot for them? Mike over at www.martinvirtualtours.com told me about an misunderstanding that he recently had in which he shot a tour for a new construction agent where he included some neighborhood photos in the tour. Later, he provided the same neighborhood photos to a [...]

Yesterday Scott Hargis sent me a copy of his e-mail marketing that he is sending to clients. I’ve talked before about how if you are building your business it’s a good idea to keep regular contact with your past and potential customers by sending them e-mail and post cards. This doesn’t replace face-to-face contact, it [...]

Back on April 25, 2007 there was an article that appeared on RealEstateJournal.com (this is the WSJ.com real estate site) by Dana Mattioli titled “Taking Home Photos That Will Draw Buyers“.I didn’t find this article quite as full of goodies as the NY Times or LA Times articles that appeared last spring although I did [...]

I’ve had several questions recently about making 360 panoramas so I thought I’d visit this subject again.
There are some that think that the work it takes to do 360s is not worth it and there are many that think having a 360 tour can set your real estate marketing apart from the crowd. I’ve done [...]

To highlight a comment from Brad at buildatour.com, Brad says:
We’re currently researching how to offer DVD format after your tour is built with Buildatour.com. As most of you know, saving to DVD format takes a WHILE. We’re not sure, at this point. how we’re going to accomplish this …. but rest assured, we’re [...]

Yesterday I got notice that DxO Optics Pro has a new version (4.5) out that has some level of integration with Lightroom. Their claim is that you can send images from within Lightroom to DxO for processing and the corrected images will be integrated back in the Lightroom catalog with metadata preserved. The other alternative [...]

Back in March of this year Jim DHeam over at www.dvd-tour.com made some sample DVDs of a couple of listings we had at the time. What Jim does is create a Flash slide show with listing photos that you e-mail him, he sends you the link to the slide show with in 24 hours and [...]

I like to study images of well known Architectural Photographers. As we’ve talked about many times before, architectural photography and real estate photography are very different. Different clients, different budget and frequently very different equipment. But as different as they are I think real estate photographers can draw inspiration and ideas from the work and [...]

The following two photos by William C Hutton, Jr are posted in the flickr photogroup and are of the same bedroom.

I was leaving a comment for William on the shot below that I thought a shot that showed the head-board end of the bed when I noticed that he already had such a shot from [...]

Drew King sent me this link to an explanation of the rules  now in force at Reuters for the use of  Photoshop.  Obviously, this has no direct link to real estate photography but I though it was interesting to see the photo modification rules in the photo journalism world… Reuters doesn’t even allow in-camera sharpening! [...]

In the flicker discussion group Gary Weinheimer gives us a great example of the difference between using a single strobe (the photo above) and using 3 strobes (the photo below).

Pretty dramatic difference!
The point I want to raise is that after you master the basics like straight walls, correcting lens distortion and getting white balance correct, [...]