Photography For Real Estate

We had a new listing this week so I thought “ah ha, an opportunity to eat my own dog food” and use my newly discovered Lightroom slide-show template (monoslideshow). So I did. Here’s what it looks like (click here). I was pressed for time so I haven’t integrated the 360 images that I always shoot [...]

Kris Steels was asking about the issue of getting access to homes for photographing and raise some questions that I’ve not discussed on the blog although I’ve discussed this issue with several folks via e-mail. So I thought it would be a good subject to bring up for folks just starting out in RE photography. [...]

The chart above (I know you can’t read it- follow the link to a readable version of this chart. “Market summary” of “King County”) shows how the inventory in King County, WA is now higher than it’s been at any time in the last 5 years by a significant amount. Based on recent news [...]

Yesterday Adobe  released an updated version of Photoshop Elements for Windows with the Mac version due early in 2008. Now that I’m a Mac user I feel left out. Wired has an an article on the release. Macworld says PE6 has a new Photomerge and Quick Selection Tool… hopefully the same one that is in [...]

Lots of good comments on the last post about straightening walls. There are several of the comments that are worth expanding on.
The best way is to get the wall right while shooting. Absolutely, do everything you can to get the walls straight while shooting like using a tripod and using the right and left [...]

I have found my mission in life and it is to make sure all the walls in real estate marketing photos do not have converging verticals!
There is something about making walls straight that is hard for photographers to get. Apparently, it just isn’t obvious that walls like the ones above detract from an image. [...]

Cherie Irwin raised an important issue with my last post on creating Monoslideshows with Lightroom. That is, in the real estate context you’d really like to brand the slide-show either with your own contact information if you are a Realtor or your client’s logo and contact information if you are a real estate photographer building [...]

I’ve been looking for a nice clean design to use for my Flash slide-shows. My criteria is: I want to be able to control the image size, speed and all other parameters, have the slide-show run automatically if the viewer does nothing yet have a clean simple control that allows the viewer to see thumbnails [...]

I recently noticed a nice overview of HDR software that is in the Panotools Wiki. I thought that this was one of the best HDR software overviews I’ve seen. This link on the Panotools NG forum which is a forum of panographers that discuss PanoTools, panoramic imaging, and related technologies and techniques, front-ends such [...]

Early last week I got my copy of AD in the mail and was particularly impressed by an article that Peter Aaron did the photography for. I was hoping that the AD website would include this sequence of images in the online version so I could do a post on it… and they did. [...]

Please excuse my off-topic post but I just got back from a great week of Kayaking on the lower Columbia river and wanted to pass on some info on this little known but great location to the several readers that expressed interest in Kayaking the lower Columbia. Skamokawa, WA is a sleepy little town in [...]

It turns out that there IS wireless internet access here at the Skamokawa kayaking center here on the lower Columbia river! So I’m not off the “grid”.
Consequently, I was looking through the PFRE flicker discussions and noticed this one that is particularly interesting on some work that Malcolm Waring is doing. This looks like an [...]

Starting tomorrow (Sun 9/9) I’ll be “off the grid” for a week (until Sun 9/16). We are participating in a kayaking adventure based a Skamokawa on the lower Columbia river. We’ll be retracing some part (the easy part) of the Lewis & Clark expedition via kayaks. As my son says, “dodging the wakes of container [...]

Adriana Barton wrote a recent article for the Globe and Mail (Canadian national newspaper) on real estate photography. I knew this article was in the works because Adriana asked my permission to quote from this blog. Although I didn’t know when it was going to be published… Reader Drew King noticed the article and pointed [...]

John Grow over at www.sidelineproductions.com sent me a link to some before and after staging photos from a before and after staging shoot that he did. Click on the photo above to see the whole series of before and after photos.
We always hire a stager when faced with listing a vacant home because we’re convinced [...]