Photography For Real Estate

I’ve been tinkering around with Twitter for a while now. What finally lead me to decide that Twitter is to important to ignore is that the blog has been getting visitors from Twitter links in the last month. What got my attention is that several people are doing tweets on PFRE blog posts. Brad Claghorn [...]

Photographic composition is a slippery subject. On the one hand, some like to codify it with a list of rules that if followed will lead to success. On the other hand, some say, “there are no rules, you know it when you see it.” I think this latter point of view comes from the fact [...]

Ever since I got my Canon G9 and started having video files to manage I’ve been wishing Lightroom had the ability to manage my video files in the same folder structure that I keep my stills in. The files are all on the same card so why not keep the master files with the stills [...]

There was a lot of interest in the e-mail marketing post I did back on June 10. Michael Yearout sent me some data on his drip marketing campaign so I thought I’d pass it along to show that there’s more than one way to do e-mail marketing. First of all Michael uses ratepoint.com for his [...]

I’d like to welcome a new PFRE blog advertiser, The Elevated Photography Company. Their new ad is just below the Tourbuzz ad on the left side-bar. The Elevated Photography Company is located in Broward County Florida, in the greater Fort Lauderdale area. The Elevated Photography Company is both a manufacturer of elevated photography systems and [...]

Thanks to Scott D for letting me know about a June 10 real estate photography article in the Charlotte, N.C, The State by Cristina Bolling titled, When You Market your house online, make sure the images are picture perfect. Articles like this make good marketing hand-outs to give to agents and they are filled with [...]

There is a new bunch of great looking PFRE Idol images to vote on for this month. See the images to vote on in the PFRE flickr group discussion. Cast your vote here through May 31. The PFRE Idol rules are here. Not valid where prohibited law.

I want to point out that Herb Dierks of Tourfactory.com gave us some very valuable insights and advice in his comment on the last post; too valuable to pass up! Herb said, “can your slide show be uploaded to YouTube? How many cell phones are capable of viewing it? From my perspective, photographing real estate [...]

I just got a Slideshow Pro newsletter announcing Slideshow Pro for Lightroom version 1.4.6. This version introduces a significant new feature: Ken Burns Panning. Slideshow Pro calls it Pan and Zoom. I updated my version of Slideshow Pro and changed my slide show for our rental property to use Ken Burns panning. It took just [...]

How would you like to have a online or printed directory of all the most successful listing agents in your area (your best prospective clients), that is updated twice a month? It has names, phone numbers, web sites and e-mail addresses and a list of all their listings. By the way, this directory doesn’t list [...]

Here are some news links that are of interest for real estate photographers: Propvid iPhone application: Carlos in AU sent me this link to the developers site of the Propvid iPhone application. Apparently Brett Clements (I did a post on Brett’s company last month) of Propvid is building a property video aggregation site in AU. [...]

I spent this weekend off the grid on a mountain biking trip in the Columbia Gorge in Northern Oregon along the Columbia River. All that blood getting pumped to my brain gave me some important insights. Besides all the extra blood in my brain, here were the three events that triggered my insight: The first [...]

Scott Hargis sent me a copy of his e-mail marketing piece today and I think it is particularly well done so I thought I’d show you what it looks like and run through what I like about it. Scott has been doing this for several years so he’s refined this by trial and error. A [...]

I got lots of feedback on yesterdays front shot post. The shot to the right is by Marcus Diddle of the Columbus, OH area. Marcus said he shot this standing on the back of his Honda Element, with his Canon T1i mounted on a 6-ft mono pod, fully extended above his head. Besides being a [...]

I love to find Realtors that appreciate the importance of PAP and a great front shot. When I do, it feels like my preaching and ranting about front shots is paying off. As I’ve said many times, the front shot is THE most important shot for marketing purposes. Not only because Realtors have to use [...]

I was working away on Friday when my Google chat came alive and a friend told me he was going to “make my day”. And indeed he did! He’d managed to pick up the PhotographyForRealEstate.COM domain for me in an auction. So I now have the .com domain for PFRE in addition to the .net [...]

I had several conversations this past week with real estate photographers that re-affirmed my belief that real estate photographers can create more opportunities for themselves if they don’t define their job as just a still photographer or just a videographer. Yes, this requires a broader set of skills but, what’s new? Success in any field [...]

Last month Pentax announced the K7. The K7 is the first camera that has honest to goodness tone mapping built-in to it’s microcode. When you put it in HDR mode and click the shutter it shoots 3 to 5 exposures +/-2EV and then after about 10 seconds out pops a JPG that’s been tone mapped. [...]

Congratulations to Dan Milstein (flickr handle: Chrome Dome Dan), of NY just voted by PFRE readers and flickr group members as PFRE Idol for June! See this flickr thread for the detail voting results. The following is Dan’s photographic background in his words: