Photography For Real Estate

Just a reminder of the PFRE Idol voting going on: Vote for the current month’s 2008 PFRE Idol until midnight Dec 31 here. Here are this months images being voted on. Then, from Jan 1 through Jan 7 we’ll be voting the best PFRE Idol image from the 2008 PFRE Idols (including the one that [...]

Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman will be screened at the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival on the following dates: January 10 – Annenberg Theater at the Palm Springs Art Museum 4:00 PM January 12 – Annenberg Theater at the Palm Springs Art Mueeum 9:00 AM Tickets can be purchased here. For information [...]

On December 31 the voting for this months PFRE Idol will be complete and the seventh PFRE Idol winner will be announced. During the first 7 days of 2009 voting will take place to choose which of those seven PFRE Idols will be the PFRE Idol of 2008. That’s right we’ll be voting for the [...]

May the Holidays and the New Year bring health, happiness and prosperity to all of you and yours. Thank you to all the readers, sponsors and participants of the PFRE community that have contributed to make this a useful community for real estate photographers. Click here or on the photo above to view a Computerized [...]

For those of you that are Lightroom users, I suggest you take a look at the two donation-ware e-books that Joe Barrett has over at Image-Space.com. There are two volumes, the first volume covers Lightroom 1.x and the newer second volume covers Lightroom 2. These e-books are tips and tricks and not manuals. I think [...]

A friend who is starting a home staging business recently ask me about how to go about marketing her business to real estate agents. Even though I’ve written before about the affinity between home staging and real estate photography before I’d never thought about how home staggers and real estate photographers have exactly the same [...]

Thanks to everyone that took time to fill out my Polldaddy survey. I got a bunch of great ideas for improving the PFRE blog. For the things I’ve already been thinking about it was a validation that I was on the right track and some ideas have never even occurred to me. Here is a [...]

I did a post on this subject back in September but I think it wasn’t clear enough so some readers missed this important subject. So I want to have another go at it and hopefully make it clearer. The title on this post is literally true. Any business that wants people doing Google searches to [...]

Last night late when I brought up Lightroom, it announced to me that version 2.2 was available. This is a free update that includes the long awaited Panasonic DMC-LX3 Camera RAW support that I talked about a few days ago. Click here (Tom Hogarty’s blog) for all the details. If Lightroom doesn’t, announce the update [...]

In the last few days I’ve come across some interesting tidbits: A reader pointed out neustep.com and webwalk.com to me. This virtual tour product is a variation on 360 technology. I could get more excited about if they were higher quality. This technology has been around for a number of years. Originally it was done [...]

I’ve decided to “eat my own dog food“. This is a software development catch phrase for practicing what you preach. In my demise of GM post I suggested that you listen to your customers so I’d like to hear from you. I’ve created a Polldaddy.com survey to collect your feedback. I have a free polldaddy [...]

My friend Sabrina Huang who is a Realtor in the San Jose, CA area and teaches real estate photography classes to Realtors convinced me last summer that I needed to maintain a list of compact, point-and-shoot cameras that are suitable for real estate photography. Sabrina’s prodding led me to do this post last July on [...]

Real estate photography is about as different a business from auto manufacturing as there could be. But there are some things in common. In both businesses listening to your customers and continually improving is essential to survival. If Toyota wasn’t in the same business, in the same markets making billions while GM is loosing billions [...]

I noticed that TourFactory has a new tour design. There are several things about this design that I really like: The huge photo size gives an opportunity to show off great photographs. The area for photos in this design is 1235 x 680 and the tour itself is about 1343 x 967. I’ve always felt [...]

This is just too funny to pass up!

I got a question about from a reader last week asking about the best way to create a fire in the fireplace with Photoshop. He said he had seen the tutorial that shows how to put flames on text but having trouble making the jump to making a fire place look convincing. Yes, there is [...]

I asked Dan Achatz last July ago to do a guest blog post for us on how he uses Photomatix for real estate shoots but up until this week he’s been too busy shooting. Many of you are familiar with Dan’s great looking HDR work that he posts on flickr or on this site. His [...]

PFRE reader Terry Roden of Calgary, Canada is launching a new tour product called Quicksilver Tours a Flash tour that combines a still photo slide show, Cylindrical and Spherical Panorama Display, Integrated Google™ Maps, Royalty-free Audio Library, Realtor® Logo and Contact Information, and Realtor® Accounts (For Photographers to manage multiple Realtors®). Click on the photo [...]

The voting results are in and the new PFRE Idol contest winner for December 2008 is Jon May, of Mt Coolum (just North of Brisbane), Queensland, Australia. There must be something special in the water around Brisbane. Jon is the second PFRE Idol in a row from Brisbane area. Congratulations Jon! Here is Jon’s story [...]