Photography For Real Estate

A couple of weeks ago a reader was lamenting the difficulties he was having with agents canceling shoots or rescheduling at the last minute and asked me if he should enforce 24 hour cancellation policy. Scheduling shoots with real estate agents has got to be one of the most challenging and irritating parts of real [...]

Just a reminder that tomorrow (Sunday, August 31) voting ends for this months PFRE Idol. This is a great exercise in critical evaluation of real estate marketing photos. Remember when voting these are marketing photos. Also, it’s the photographers skills we are evaluating, not the property. Here is the info you need to vote: This [...]

Because there have been several times this year that I couldn’t get up to Issaquah to shoot my wife Levi’s listings, Levi hired various real estate photographers in the Seattle area too shoot some of her listings. Being able to observe the whole process of hiring and getting results from real estate photographers from the [...]

I’ve been working hard this summer on the second edition of my Photography For Real Estate e-book. I’m going to make several improvements in both the content and the way I distribute this e-book:

In real estate photography there’s one shot that is as important as all the others put together. It’s also called the primary exterior shot. Most MLS’s require it to be an exterior shot. It’s the shot that grabs the buyers attention and motivates them to look at the home in more detail.

I’m working hard on the second edition of my Photography For Real Estate e-book. I’m adding several new chapters and updating several of the existing ones. One new chapter will be on the process of shooting 360 images for real estate. (Everyone that has purchased the first edition will get a free copy of the [...]

Here are some recent news links of interest to real estate photographers: Photojojo.com has a post on putting a point and shoot on a painters pole. This is very similar to the one I did recently on the same subject but I like their suggestion of using a small light ball head on the top [...]

Today a reader asked me for statistics that demonstrate that good marketing photography pays off. The exact wording was, “Do you have any statistics on the benefit of hiring a real estate photographer (i.e. home with professional photos sell X% faster)…I’m looking for anything to back up why a homeowner would want to use professional [...]

Yesterday I was standing in a line (with my G9 in my pocket) listening to a recent TWIP podcast in which Alex Lindsay and Stu Maschwitz were talking about the two latest G9 contenders just announced. I’ll spare you another rant about my Canon G9 but a fact that hasn’t escaped camera manufacturers is that [...]

See, I predicted yesterday that since the print media is cratering that all these unemployed print media photographers would be moving into real estate photography and this morning I wake up to a post by David Hobby on real estate photography. What can I say. Seriously, David has a wonderful series of real estate shots [...]

Vincent Laforet, a Pulitzer prize-winning staff photographer for the NY Times, sums up the situation going on now in photography as follows: “This past year has been one of the roughest years for the newspaper and magazine industry — and the truth be told — the outlook for the next few years looks even grimmer” [...]

Phil Scott of New Canaan, CT is the second winner of the PFRE Idol award for this month. The photo above is Phil’s front-shot that he submitted for the contest. For a front-shot it think it is a particularly striking image. It helps that this property is a striking property elevated above the surroundings but I [...]

In the first PFRE Idol contest two contestants tied for first place. One of the winners was Tyra Pacheco. Those of you that frequent the PFRE flickr photo discussion group will recognize Tyra’s work and notice how much her work has improved over the last year. This is Tyra’s kitchen shot that she submitted to [...]

The LA (Santa Clarita) workshop was really fun, and I think the participants got a lot out of it. Thomas and I worked hard to come up with a format that combined time for us to do a bit of lecture and discuss gear and our general approach, but which maximized the time everyone spent [...]

I talked about Lightroom 2 and PTlens last month just after PTlens came out but this combination is such a sweet combination for real estate photographers I need to say more. The main point I want to stress is that if you are starting out in real estate photography and trying to decide what photo [...]

Sound’s like Thomas and Scott’s Lighting workshop in Santa Clarita was a big success. Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski attended the workshop and it sounds like they were quite impressed. See Scott’s blog for a recap of the workshop.

Michael Cole of CPGtours.com yesterday agreed to sponsor the PFRE Idol Contest by providing each PFRE Idol with 5 free tours on CPGtours.com (a $100 value). Thanks Michael for your support! Also, thanks to Michael Asgian for volunteering his time to create the pages/code that will allow us to make the contest contestants anonymous, allow [...]

We have two winners- tlpacheco (Tyra Pacheco) and pwscott61 (Phillip Scott) each with 17 votes. The images in the contest are on this flickr discussion thread. Congradulations to Tyra and Phillip. More on Tyra and Phillips work in a future post.