Photography For Real Estate

danjryan in the flickr discussion group points out an interesting little HDR tutorial over at abduzeedo.com. HDR topics are some of the most popular subjects these days. And I can understand why if done well HDR techniques can save time and equipment costs when shooting interiors, which in real estate photography is important. However, the [...]

I need to confess. I’ve committed grievous sins. I’ve used Photoshop to modify the physical appearance of the exterior of a home we are going to put on the market this week. Not just once but twice. The evidence is in the comparison photo to the right. This all started when my wife Levi (the [...]

Over at photoshopinsider Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski made the above video introducing Adobe’s new, free photo editor online photo sharing site. Wall Street Journal also has an article on the new product.I finally got to use Photoshop Express. Turns out the site doesn’t seem to work quite right when I use Firefox on my [...]

I’ve been reading Christian Bloch’s book, The HDRI Handbook, and finding it useful in learning HDR processing. Christian is a visual effects artist who works in Hollywood and has created effects for TV shows StarTrek, Invasion, Lost, as well as several movies. Christian’s book has a companion site at: www.hdrlabs.com/book. This site has some good [...]

I did a shoot this weekend of a new listing we have and decided to use both my usual lighting technique (primarily on camera flash) and Enfuse and use what ever worked the best. It turned out not to be much contest; I like the Enfuse results best. Here are a sequence of photos that [...]

I just tried out a new do-it-yourself tour site that was launched not to long ago called tourbuzz.net. The site is designed with photographers in mind because it allows a photographer to create an manage many client’s tours and put the photographer’s branding on tour as well as the agent’s branding information.

A quick update on the April 25, Seattle Workshop (details are here): We now have more than enough committed attendees registered to announce that the workshop is a go for sure! Scott Hargis’s session on lighting with multiple strobes is a popular attraction and drawing people from all over. So far we have attendees registered [...]

Think you need to use lighting equipment to get a bright interior? Think again! This tour is shot by a company based in Seattle called Vista Estate. Vista Estate’s approach is to shoot with no lighting equipment. This is one of their sample tours that shows what you can do without any extra lighting equipment, [...]

The Lightroom 1.4 update for Mac and Windows has been temporarily removed from the Adobe.com web site. Those Lightroom users who have installed Lightroom 1.4 should uninstall the update and install Lightroom 1.3.1.(Mac, Win) until a further update can be provided. This decision is based on errors found in the 1.4 release. You might want [...]

Recently reader David Palermo had the opportunity to spend over an hour with one of the great architectural photographers, Julius Shulman at his LA home. With David’s permission I am reposting his description of his meeting with Shulman here just as David posted it on the PFRE flickr discussion group:

Thanks to Justin Soles for passing this link on to us. It’s from IntoTheBox.tv. This is one of the funniest video’s I’ve seen in a long time on real estate video.

Today I’ve been testing my PAP (pole aerial photography) equipment because this weekend I have to shoot a new listing we have where the home is sited well above the street and there may not be room to use my usual technique of standing on the roof of my pickup. I thought it would be [...]

I had an interesting time this weekend shooting the same property that I’d shot back in 2004. The property is a funky little A-Frame on a remote lane on Tiger Mt near Issaquah, WA. My wife Levi has sold almost every home on this lane over the last 5 years.

In the discussion of the post this week on the subject of What to charge as a real estate photographer some readers requested that I do a poll on what real estate photographers make. As usual the poll is on the left hand side-bar.

I wanted to point out that for those interested in an introduction to HDR (High Dynamic Range) Alex Linsey has created a nice little introduction video to HDR software and processing. You can download it or get it as a podcast via iTunes.

Mike Martin pointed out that Ubuildtours.com has done a major upgrade. Back in December I did a post on ubuildtours.com. This new update has a bunch of updates: More browsers than just IE for building tours.

I’ve chosen Dan Truax-Weston (dtruax in the flickr group) as the PFRE real estate photographer for the month of March. Dan is based in Escondido, CA (North of San Diego) and has been doing real estate photography for about a year.I picked Dan because I’ve been watching his work improve over the last 6 months [...]

Drew King sent me a link to a tour done by Hurwitz-James of some luxury estates.Since we’ve been evaluating tours I thought this would be instructive to look at what kind of marketing is going on at the obscenely expensive ($9 million to $25 million) end of the market these days.

As reported over at Lightroom News, Timothy Armes has a new donation-ware image blending plugin for Lightroom that creates images similar to tonemapped images. I purchased a copy and have been playing around with it for several hours. It is very convenient to use, just select the images you want to blend in Lightroom and [...]

Alan Cole recently left a comment on a HDR post that I did last December where he left a link to a tutorial that describes his technique for doing HDR for his real estate photography. I thought it was interesting enough to post where more people will see it.