Photography For Real Estate

The post I did on atticfire was extremely popular. I asked the guys at atticfire if they would talk about their shooting and work-flow process but not unexpectedly they declined to share any secrets with us.
There was a bunch of traffic on the atticfire post from a forum on CGarchitect (“A global community for Architectural [...]

Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty  announced that there be an update to Lightroom in mid-November. This will bring Lightroom to full Leopard compatibility. The problems are:

The Print module may not load
The Import dialog and other dialogs can “disappear” below Lightroom’s main window.  The dialog can be retrieved by switching to another application and then returning [...]

Yesterday I heard from Darrel Klassen over at aplanding.com which is a site dedicated to the various forms of aerial photography. Aplanding.com appears to be a good resource for information on real estate aerial photography. Darrel says there are a bunch of real estate photographers that frequent the site.

Thanks to Dave Moore studios for pointing out the atticfirearchitecture.com site.
Atticfire is an architectural photography team working out of Savanna, Georgia that claims to shoot 8 spaces a day (5 shots above the industry standard). Remember, this is not real estate photography this is architectural photography where 3 spaces a day is the standard because [...]

Note there are two flickr threads discussing possible problems with Lightroom running under the new Leopard:
Look Here and here
So if you are a Lightroom user and are thinking of installing the new Leopard update you may want to follow these discussions before you install Leopard.

Scott Highton, VR pioneer, gave a talk recently on photographing panoramas. If you are at all interested in VR photography this video gives a nice introduction to the subject. Scott worked at Apple whey QuickTime VR was first introduced. In this video Scott discusses the technical aspects of shooting and stitching cylindrical and spherical/cubic panoramas.

Cherie Irwin pointed out an article on MSN real estate by Dana Mattioli of the wsj.com. The tips are not new to readers of this blog but I like the quotes from buyers that these kind of articles. Also the catch phrases that reporters come up with are interesting. “pix appeal” and “online appeal” are [...]

Rick Miner’s just passed on an example of the big results that are possible when you use great real estate photography and great online presentation. Rick says a week ago a he sold two adjoining condos on alki point in Seattle: www.alkibeachpenthouse.com and www.AlkiBeachPenthouse2.com to the same buyer. The buyer found these properties themselves online [...]

Back in April I did a post on a technique for making composite images with masking in Photoshop. The photo above is from that post and is the result of combining one exposure of the sky with another exposure of the house, foreground and trees. Of coarse the trick with this technique is creating a [...]

I found these 3 videos thanks to Base10 blog. I know this is going to be controversial but I think it needs saying. Video of this size just doesn’t do a good job of showing off a home. There’s nothing in homes that moves so why bother with video? People are using video just because [...]

John Nack reports that a recent study done by InfoTrends shows that group of 1026 Professional Photographers in North America were asked which software they use for RAW processing. They reported:

 65.5% were using Photoshop Camera Raw Plug-in
23.6% were using Lightroom
5.5% were using Aperture

Even among Mac based pros Lightroom is almost 2 to 1 over Aperture.

Justin Soles reminded me this morning of the excellent collection of bad real estate photos that Athol Kay has on his blog. I’d seen it before but some how today it really got me laughing. His count of bad real estate photos is up to 184 which is one of my favorites. Athol’s collection is [...]

Last week Denis Chumakov over at flashpanoramas.com released an update (v2.2) to his Flash panorama player. I think this version of Denis’s player is very significant break through in panorama display technology. QuickTimeVR has always been the standard of quality for panorama players. Quality in panorama players is means how smooth the image moves as [...]

Cherie Irwin is purchasing a new wide-angle lens for her Canon 30D and wants some advice. Cherie says:
“I’m thinking about purchasing a new wide angle lens, since I am experiencing some major distortions and focusing issues with mine after I dropped it on the ground. I took into my local camera shop, and they [...]

Marc Lacoste brought up a excellent point in the comment discussion on the house boat slide show that I commented on last Friday. I was ranting about why it’s important not to use Java as a display technology for slide shows and Marc accurately pointed out that the slide show of Aaron’s house boat [...]