Photography For Real Estate

This post is for Enkay, a reader that asked me to go through  basic shooting considerations and post processing workflow. Great idea, I written about shooting and workflow for a while. Here are the things I do when shooting:

I upgraded to Lightroom 2 yesterday like the photo-editing geek I am. I can’t resist a new version of Photoshop or Lightroom. The upgrade was fast and painless for me. Lightroom 2 rebuilds  existing catalogs. It is now more drive aware, allowing a catalog to have photos on multiple drives. I like this feature since [...]

I’ve made several updates to the listing of real estate photography lenses (click on the “lenses” button above the blog header image): I’ve put the slrgear.com lens quality rating in the middle column and sorted each lens type section by this quality rating. This makes the highest quality lenses at the top of each section. [...]

It’s time to vote for this months PFRE Idol. To vote use the Polldaddy poll at the bottom of the right side-bar. To look at the four contestants contest entries see this flickr discussion thread. The voting will be open until Aug 1 (I’ll take down the poll when I get up Friday 8/1 around [...]

I’m back home from an relaxing week of family reunion activities. Turns out the location we choose for this years get together, Mt Shasta, CA, was clouded all week (and still is) in smoke from the hundreds of forest fires raging in California. I managed to catch one shot of Shasta when the smoke cleared [...]

Due to a fantastic response, Scott and Thomas’s lighting workshop on August 2nd has been filled. They have received enough inquires to potentially organize an additional workshop on Sunday, August 3rd.  Please let Thomas know (thomas@tgrubbaphoto.com) ASAP if you would be interested in attending the Sunday workshop.

Thanks to reader “mjdwilson” for passing along the link to this site on the Documentary film on 97 year old Julius Shulman. Shulman is considered by most the greatest Architectural photographer. Hopefully this film will be available soon on DVD. If you are interested in Shulman see the March post featuring PFRE reader David Palermo’s [...]

I’m going to a family reunion next week in Southern Oregon near Mt Shasta. I’m not sure what kind of Internet connections I’ll find. I think I’ll be able to answer e-mail most every day since Google maps says there are internet cafe’s in the area but not sure how much I’ll be posting. I [...]

Sabrina Huang, a San Jose, CA Realtor that I met at the PFRE Seattle Workshop last April pointed out that I shouldn’t excluding point-and-shoot from my review of real estate cameras. She’s right, today’s point-and-shoot cameras are pretty amazing. I haven’t mentioned them because the majority of readers of this blog are professional photographers and [...]

Last week after I did a post on THE Best Lens/Body combination for real estate photography I got questions and comments like, “What if you don’t have a $4,500 budget… whats the best low-end combination?” Well, here’s my thinking on the low end choices:

Chicago, June 12, 2008 — VHT, Inc., a leading provider of visual marketing services, has released the results of its exclusive survey of agents‘ and brokers’ marketing activities. With more than 1,300 respondents, the survey provides a national, look at how real estate professionals, in the US, allocate marketing dollars for print, television, direct mail [...]

On Friday I managed to update my “old” iPhone to 2.0 software.  I think iPhone apps and the iTunes app store are the most significant feature of the recent Apple iPhone upgrade circus. Since I’m a hopelessly addicted 360 image geek the first iPhone app I downloaded from the store was the PangeaVR 360 image [...]

I ran across a wonderful little video about Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor who is doing research on how to algorithms for detecting altered photos. Hany is working with Adobe to make his algorithms for fake photo detection widely available. It’s amazing to me how much photo modification is goes on in advertising but even [...]

Several days ago a reader asked me what THE best setup for shooting real estate would be. Until then I’d always been asked what the cheapest one was. At the Seattle Workshop in April I had a chance to shoot with a Nikon D3 and 14-24mm f2.8 for about 20 minutes. I could tell then [...]

Apparently Getty Images and flickr.com have struck a deal and developed some tools for Getty Images editors to scan through flickr groups looking for photographic talent. If a photographer is chosen by Getty Image editors. According to the article on techcrunch.com, “Each selected member will have their images licensed through a special Flickr-branded section of [...]

When Aperture 2.0 was released I was skeptical about the product. Mainly because I’d been on the Lightroom bandwagon for a while. However, for some reason I can’t explain I purchased a copy and have been using it more and more. It has some pretty amazing features and the more I use it the more [...]

Think you have enough talent to be the next PFRE Idol? Now’s your chance to prove it! Check out details here. With the help and advice of many readers and PFRE flickr group members I’ve changed the photographer of the month award selection process to remove some of the objections to the last process. Thanks [...]

Matthew Mallett of Melbourne, Australia has been voted the Real Estate Photographer of the month for July.Runners up were: Tyra Pacheco Linda Sabiston Mike Ortega Tim McEachern

If you are a Real Estate Photographer that uses Lightroom or Aperture what you need is an little application that interfaces with these two applications that will fix lens barrel distortion and converging verticals and doesn’t cost a bundle. PTlens has been close to filling this need for a long time. But the latest version [...]

I’d like more feedback about how you feel about the current PFRE photographer of the month process. I’ve created a poll for you to give me feedback on the right side-bar below where the July nominees for photographer of the month are listed. Also feel free to send me e-mail on this subject. I want [...]