Photography For Real Estate

Scott Hargis has a good video that walks you through what he takes to a real estate photography shoot. He covers cameras, lenses, and all his lighting equipment. Very informative! The one bit of gear that Scott doesn’t explain in this video is how his shirt works. Scott’s wearing a state of the art optical [...]

If you’ve been browsing around on B&H you may have noticed that there’s some instant cash rebates for a lot of Canon gear. Here’s an example. There is a list of all the cash rebates on the Canon site since they are all manufacturer rebates. The rebates are all good 10/12/2009 through 1/16/2010. Since my [...]

I ran across PlanOmatic today. It’s one of the first tours I’ve seen that will recognize if it’s being browsed by an iPhone and adapt it’s display to the iPhone browser and screen size. This is an example (www.12thestrand.com ) of a PlanOmatic tour so you can see what it looks like in an ordinary browser. [...]

I had an insightful conversation last night with a highly successful portrait photographer (lets call him Jim) that has been struggling, unsuccessfully, during the last 12 months to break into real estate photography. Even though Jim’s real estate work is jaw dropping good, from what I could tell he has just not connecting with the [...]

Here is something for your weekend entertainment. Watch it while you can; Vincent took the movie down from his site at Canon’s request. Apparently Canon wants it only on their site. But it’s still up on Stu’s blog. Stu and Vincent used a prototype Canon 1D Mk IV to shoot this. Stu says this was [...]

Whoa! Did I get an education today! A couple of my Kiwi readers (Neville and Martin) put me on to the subject of QR (quick response) codes. This is some of the coolest stuff I’ve run into in a long time. It all came out of my post yesterday about mobile phones being important in [...]

The Lightroom 3.0 Public Beta is available for anyone to try out. It should be understood that this is what it says… a beta version. Adobe does this with Lightroom so they can get feedback from photographers before they do a final release. The features in the final release may vary from what’s in the [...]

I want to pass along another example of the importance of mobile devices because two weeks ago when I suggested that buyers may stand out in the street in front of a listing and look at photos of the inside of the listing I was amazed by how many readers thought that this was an [...]

Today, because I used to be a agent or have used Tourfactory products in the past, I got a promotional piece of “bacon” from TourFactory. Bacon is not to be confused with Spam because it’s much tastier than Spam. Anyway, here is the whole piece. Because I think it is valuable to analyze and learn [...]

I was having a discussion with reader “Uncle Louis” the last few days about alternatives for inexpensive manual flashes. Louis was complaining that he was having trouble finding the old Nikon classic manual flashes (SB-80dx and SB-26) that are so popular with real estate photographers. For the new comers, these flashes are popular because they [...]

Last week I got a request from Karl Hoelscher, who would like to know what techniques people are using to sharpen real estate images. So I’ll start off by saying that I depend on Lightroom 2 for my sharpening needs. Before Lightroom 2 was released  for many years I used PhotoKit Sharpener, by PixelGenius. PhotoKit [...]

One of the greatest enjoyments I get from doing this blog is hearing stories from readers of how they have been able to build a successful real estate photography business. About 35% do real estate photography full time and about 47% do real estate photography part time. I hear from many folks that are using [...]

Last week Leandro Suarez a real estate broker in Mendoza, Argentina that I’ve been helping get started photographing his own listings ask me if there was some where that did free virtual tours. I believe Leandro’s question grew out of the post I did a while back on free websites. At first I was a [...]

Scott Hargis just put up a excellent tutorial on his blog on how to keep your verticals from converging. Scott’s main point is if you are not diligent about keeping your verticals from converging, nobody will take you serious as a professional interior photographer. Scott goes through a step by step  8 minute tutorial on [...]

I’ve posted updated versions both the English version and the Russian version of the Realtor photo guide. Andrey Khrolenok who did the Russian translation inspired me to do this update. Andrey reduced the font size in the Russian version so there is room for photo examples. He also overlaid each photo example with a red [...]

Mobile devices are becoming increasingly significant as a tool for home buyers and and agents. Here are a couple of facts that suggest the trend that is occurring with mobile devices: Smartphones now account for more than a quarter (25.8%) of worldwide traffic according to gizmag.com August figures with the Nokia N70 leading the pack [...]

NEW YORK — The next time you snap a digital photo and post it to flickr, you can thank the three men who won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday. They helped develop fiber-optic cable and invented the “eye” in digital cameras — technology that has given rise to film-free photography and high-speed Internet service, [...]

OK, check this out this new look! Based on all the reader input that I got last week when Peter, my WordPress guy, moved the blog width to 1280 and 1024, I had Peter do a refinement to make the blog center content column fluid, based on the browser window width. The way the blog [...]

Congradulations to Mario Restrepo who has been voted PFRE Idol for Oct 2009 by the PFRE flickr group. Mario services all of San Diego County, CA and Northern Baja, MX. We featured Mario’s 360 work on PFRE back in May of 2008. Mario is a very accomplished 360 shooter. Mario says: Hello Everyone, To start, [...]