Photography For Real Estate

I got a call for help today from Karl who will be shooting a large 130 room mountain lodge in Arizona next week. Karl says he has a couple of strobes and remote triggers but no umbrellas. He’ll be shooting Sunday through Thursday and would like to have some suggestions “particularly on lighting/possible placements and [...]

Early in April 2009 HDRsoft released a Aperture Edit Plug-in for Photomatix-like tonemapping. For now it doesn’t have blending but they say they will add the blending functionality to a future release of the plug-in. They say that they have no current plans to offer batch processing in the plug-in because of the fact that [...]

I believe anyone doing real estate photography that doesn’t also have a real estate flyer, postcard, brochure and online tour product is missing an opportunity to add profit to a shoot. Listing agents need a flyer for each property they list. Most will mail between 100 and 300 postcards to the neighborhood where the listing [...]

David Hobby, over at strobist.com, gives a great example of how to put together a nice little no cost property site using the free blogs anyone can get at blogger.com. You can get similar blogs at wordpress.com for free. Wow, I hope David’s listing agent appreciates what a fantastic client she has. I’ve never seen [...]

My wife Levi just spent a couple days analyzing the closed sales, Pending sales and active listings in a Seattle Eastside neighborhood (in Issaquah) where she is going to have a listing come on the market soon. Her assessment is that the market in Issaquah is the best it’s been for quite a long time. [...]

Last week the Tourbuzz.com guys (Alan Pristein and Paul Rodman) announced that their new Flash player is in beta. I think the new, low profile, hide-able thumbnail controller bar is a great addition. Here is what the new player looks like. They’ve been polling users to see what people think about removing the older style [...]

I just stumbled across the list of online photographic classes at Kelby Training and wanted to pass it on to those of you that have not seen it. There are online photographic classes by Joe McNally, John P. Caponigro, Vincent Versace, Moose Peterson, David Ziser an many others as well as Photoshop and Lightroom classes by [...]

Yesterday while working with Dale, who purchased my Business of Real Estate Photography e-book, and was trying to use the branding box HTML that is in the book, I discovered that the newest 1.4 version of Slideshow Pro for Lightroom broke my branding box HTML code. This is the trouble with writing HTML for someone [...]

Today Nikon announced the new AF-S DX NIKKOR 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5G ED lens with built-in Silent Wave Motor (SWM) for Nikon DX-format digital SLR cameras. Compact and lightweight, this ultra wide-angle 2.4x zoom DX NIKKOR features a focal length range of 10 to 24mm, whose picture angle of 109°-61° is equivalent to a focal length of [...]

While I don’t think compact cameras are ideal for shooting real estate I know there are Realtors out there trying to shoot acceptable photos with the absolute minimum cost so I won’t be an equipment snob. Fact is, I used a Nikon CoolPix-995 with a wide-angle converter for several years and thought it was the [...]

There is a new bunch of great looking PFRE Idol images to vote on for this month. See the 7 images to vote on in the PFRE flickr group discussion. Cast your vote here through Apr 31. The PFRE Idol rules are here. Not valid where prohibited law. Looks like I need to come up [...]

Last month PDN reported that the number of people in photography related jobs is up even though the percentage of photographers that consider themselves unemployed is also up. The article pointed out that “Photography stood out from most other artistic professions, however, for growing the number of people employed in the work force. Other artistic [...]

There was a recent article in USA Today that both promotes Joe McNally’s new book, The Hotshoe Diaries, and talks about the huge trend that’s been going on towards using small strobes. Much of Joes book gives insights on using small strobes from the point of view of a Nikon shooter. Apparently, it’s valuable as [...]

I just talked to Scott Hargis about the series of lighting workshops that he and Thomas Grubba are doing and Scott said that their Saturday April 18th workshop in Phoenix is sold out but if they can get one more student sign up for Sunday, April 19th there will be a Sunday Phoenix workshop with [...]

Chad Jones recently pointed out to me that he uses agencylogic.com property sites and his clients love them. Chad says the features his clients particularly like are the full screen slide shows, SMS text with sign rider system and online template designer for unlimited designs. I pass on reader recommendations like Chad’s because I think [...]

Forgive me for being somewhat off topic today, but this is something that has been bothering me for a while and I like to hear how others feel about it. I’m a long time subscriber to Architectural Digest, but over the last few months I’ve been reexamining the last three periodicals that I subscribe to [...]

This last week a Realtor ask me to look over his work that was presented on his web site. The photos were wonderful, but they were buried several clicks under a barrage of text and presented with a small, clumsy little slide show that I couldn’t figure out how to control. There’s a lesson here [...]

I started my Real Estate Photography business “PropertyPIX” in Hobart, Tasmania in 2006. Previous careers have been 26 years as a Bank Manager with Westpac, and 16 years as a real estate consultant. I was burnt-out from 7 days a week in real estate sales, and at that stage my share portfolio was going very [...]

Several discussions I’ve had with readers in the last week reminded me that it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about how easy it is to provide how to provide high quality slide shows to your client quickly and easily for just pennies. First of all here’s why you need to supply a slide [...]

Congratulations to Milton Lowe of Hobart, Tasmania, who’s delightful image above was voted winner of the PFRE Idol award. See this flickr discussion thread to see other photos and how the voting came out. Milton wins, tours from cpgtours.com , a iPropertysites.com property site, the PFRE winners seal graphic, front page link on PFRE blog [...]