Photography For Real Estate

I’ve talked to several Real Estate Photographers recently in the process of purchasing new DSLRs and noticed that there is a misunderstanding about what lenses are appropriate for real estate photography on the new DSLRs.
First of all there are two types of DSLRs:

Full frame DSLRs that have digital sensors the same, or nearly the same [...]

Carol Lloyd has an article in the SF Chronicle on December 23 that describes a new product (vizzvox.com) that allows you to easily create a slide show with a voice-over. Here is an example. And here’s another. A great presentation of a pretty nice pad. I could live there! For $150 you can create a [...]

It’s a good time of the year to look at what worked well in 2007 and to plan how to refine focus to what works best in the coming year. So I was looking over the top PFRE posts for this year. To rank these I used a combination of traffic and comments. A low [...]

In Seattle, each night during the Christmas season a large Yacht with carolers (the Christmas ship) visit various public beaches around Lake Washington. Seattle boaters decorate their boats with lights and follow the Christmas ship to join in the festivities.

Here are my picks of the top 36 Real Estate Photos from the Photography For Real Estate (PFRE) flickr.com photo discussion group. I selected these 36 photos from the 1258 images that were posted this year. As of today the number of members in the PFRE flickr group is 589.
For those of you that have [...]

It’s now ten weeks after I started distribution of the Photography For Real Estate e-book. It is very clear that demand for the e-book is very strong. I’m surprised, and gratified by the fact that it is selling well  worldwide. Around 50% of sales are in the US. Australia is a close second followed by [...]

My wife Levi just returned from an intensive week in Issaquah, WA helping several long time clients purchase properties. One of her comments about the experience was instructive for anyone that creates or makes decisions about which tour to use. She said, “why do all these tours load so slow and why can’t I control [...]

Just the other day a real estate photographer friend was telling me how much it cost him this last year to provide slide show tours with each photo shoot he did. Including a good looking tour with each shoot is really a nice touch and I think contributes to building a client base. However, if [...]

Some say yes, some say no. Reader David Palermo sent me some of his recent work testing HDR processing for interiors. David showed me the following images:

www.davidpalermo.com/hdrtest.jpg
www.davidpalermo.com/hdrtest2.jpg
www.davidpalermo.com/hdrtest3.jpg

William Baxter over at UniqueHomeSites.com saw our last post on ubuildtour.com and asked us to take a look at UniqueHomeSites and give him some feedback from the point of view of photographers.
Click here or on the image to the right to see a sample UniqueHomeSite tour.
First of all UniqueHomeSites.com is a Canadian only tour company. [...]

Frank Llosa over at blog.FranklyRealty.com came up the data I’ve been looking for. Frank studied 268 sold listings in the Fairfax, VA area in the $400K to $500k price range since May 2007. He found that homes with no photos sold for 3.8% less, homes with one photo had an average market time average of [...]

Mike Martin, a real estate photographer that works out of Gig Harbor, WA pointed out to me that ubuildtours.com is a do-it-yourself tour hosting service that is very inexpensive ($5/tour). For $5 you get a lot: Flash or Java, Ken Burns panning, unlimited photos, cylindrical panoramas, all the usual links, down loadable files for [...]

I’ve had several comments and questions about my blog header image that’s along the top of the blog now so I thought I’d do a post on the story behind this image since it is one of my favorite images.
First of all thanks Shaun for pointing out that the original image that came with this [...]

If you are into creating your own slide shows with Lightroom you will probably be interested in the new Slideshowpro template released by Dominey Design for Lightroom.
I’ve always liked the look of SlideShowPro slide shows but up until this recent release for Lightroom you had to have Flash and fiddle with XML files and it [...]

Hojin Chang’s neighborhood bench photo in the flickr group made me remember that I’ve never pointed out the importance of photographing the neighborhood. My wife Levi has this saying that “you have to sell the neighborhood before you can sell the home.” Which is obvious when you think about it. Buyers have to be attracted [...]