Photography For Real Estate

There are a couple of good resources that have come to my attention recently over at the Association of Media Photographers site recently. The first is the Strictly Business Blog. This blog has a constant stream of great photography business information on it. Just one example is this video on negotiation from a post back [...]

A couple of months ago there was an outstanding thread in the PFRE Discussion group discussing various approaches on how to get clean whites when shooting HDR. This thread caught my attention because getting clean whites when shooting HDR is a classic problem that many beginning real estate  photographers struggle with. fuzzybabybunny:) starts out the [...]

I want to point out a change to the blog that may not be all that obvious. At the bottom of each post there’s a line of text that says, “Share and Enjoy“. Under that text is a line of little icons and links for posting to social networking sites. The icons are a little [...]

Back in September I wrote a post about ReMask, a masking plugin by Topaz. Topaz just released a Beta of a new improved version of ReMask that’s called ReMask2. This new version is pretty amazing! It’s very intuitive to use, fast, and best of all it does a fantastic job of quickly knocking out skies [...]

I want to point out the valuable service that Scott Hargis is providing over at his blog. Scott is reviewing real estate photography portfolios. For any one that requests a review, he makes 30 minute video stepping through your portfolio (website) giving a detailed discussion of what he likes and doesn’t like about your portfolio. [...]

A readers recent question about providing floor plans made me realize that I’ve never done a post on the subject of floor plans. First of all floor plans are one of those services like flyers. Some  real estate photographers don’t want to do fool around with doing graphics work. On the other hand if you [...]

Scott Hargis’s Brisbane & Màlaga Lighting Workshops: Yesterday Scott announced that he is doing a lighting workshop in Màlaga, Spain and one in Brisbane, Australia. There are only 8 seats in each class so you’ll need to move fast to signup before they are full. Get all the details and signup at Scott’s workshop site. [...]

I was delighted to see that the Julius Shulman Film, Visual Acoustics, is finally coming to an art theatre near me in Portland, OR next month. If it’s showing in Portland it’s got to be playing everywhere! If you are not familiar with Julius Shulman, check out some of the previous posts that I’ve done [...]

I’m a little late in posting today because besides caulking my windows for the winter, I’ve been trying to think of some way I can help stimulate the real estate photographer profession. Why? Because this morning Fed Chairman Bernanke came clean and admitted that unemployment will get worse before it gets better. I decided what [...]

Recently WelcomeMat released a report on video usage in real estate. Among other things it reports that real estate video usage was up 95% in the first half of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. I think the report should more clearly state that the data from this report is from the WelcomeMat [...]

I got an e-mail yesterday from Rusty Freeman in LA. Rusty said: Larry: Just wanted to tell you about an MLS search we completed this past week on the local board. We searched the county for all homes $2 mil & up. Found over 1,000 listings. … I was looking for homes & agents to [...]

I want to finally welcome three other real estate photography blogs and a podcast to the real estate photography niche. Here is the run down: Scott Hargis: Scott is a long time contributor in the PFRE flickr group and is probably best known for the lighting workshops that he and Thomas Grubba do. Scott has [...]

I enjoy  doing this blog because it’s an opportunity to have diverse discussions with a wide variety of people around the world. One of the ways I decide to what to blog about is the subjects that come up while talking to readers. When several people I talk to bring up the same subject, it’s [...]

In my Real Estate Photography Business book I use a distribution curve from a 2004 National Association of Realtors (NAR) income study to demonstrate why it’s so important for real estate photographers to target their marketing.  The NAR income study shows that: In 2004 the median income for Realtors who had been in the business [...]

In the interest of covering a broad range of software alternatives for correcting verticals, barrel distortion I want to summarize two other applications: ShiftN: A reader pointed out this free Windows only application to me. I’d heard of it but never tried it before. Since I recently purchased Parallels for my Mac, so I can [...]

Several recent questions and comments from readers made me realize that the posts I have on PTLens are several years old. Ever since I’ve been doing this blog I’ve been recommending PTLens as an alternative for fixing verticals and barrel distortion but as of the summer of 2008 Tom Niemann released a version of PTLens [...]

Congradulations to Nick Jones (flickr handle “bit fishy bob“) who has been voted PFRE Idol for Nov 2009 by the PFRE flickr group. Nick serves San Diego County, CA. Nick is the second winner in a row from the San Diego, CA area. Nick’s winning image to the right is some what reminiscent  of Julius Shulman’s [...]

For the last couple of days I’ve been digging through the new features in the Lightroom 3 Beta. All I can say is Wow! There area a bunch of really cool new features in this version. Matt and Scott over at photoshopuser.com have a nice concise summary of the major features. I think one of [...]

Recently when I talked about posting a video tour to youtube.com a reader told me that youtube had changed their terms of service and did not allow real estate video. After studying the youtube terms of service and talking to some active real estate video shooters, I have to report that while anything is possible [...]