Archive for May, 2010

Polester: A Great Ready To Use Pole Aerial Photography System

May 31st, 2010

Nik who is a PAP enthusiast and a member of  the PFRE flickr group sent me some links on the Polester from www.longshotcamerasystems.com which is a PAP rig that looks like it would be a great for real estate photographers. There are a couple of benefits of the Polester: It’s off the shelf. You get the [...]

Scott Hargis Lighting Workshop Schedule Update

May 30th, 2010

Scott Hargis has added several new lighting workshops to his schedule. Phoenix AZ –    Saturday July 31, 2010 Phoenix AZ –    Sunday August 1, 2010 Vero Beach, FL –  Saturday August 14, 2010 Vero Beach, FL –  Sunday August 15, 2010 For those not familiar with Scott’s lighting workshops, they are focused on [...]

Demand Link Credit When Newspapers Use Your Photos or Info

May 29th, 2010

I did a post on in March about how Russ Freeman’s great twilight front shoot helped Russ’s listing agent customer make a quick sale of a San Clemente home. Russ told me yesterday that the Wall Street Journal was running his photo of this San Clemente home as the center piece of an article on luxury homes. [...]

Sony Alpha NEX-5 Has Real Estate Photography Features

May 27th, 2010

Thanks to Russ Freeman for calling my attention to the new Sony Alpha NEX-5. David Pogue, Technology columnist for the New York Times, did an article and a video on the NEX-5 last week. The NEX-5 is one of the new mirror-less digital cameras with interchangeable lenses. Besides it’s small size it has several features that make [...]

How To Make PFREtours Look Like You Are Hosting Them In Your Domain

May 25th, 2010

We’ve had requests to make PFREtours look like they are hosted in the tour creators domain. There are typically two reasons you want to do this: Some real estate photographers want to resell pfretours to their clients. When you do this you’d like to have the tour in your domain and not have your clients [...]

How To Get Top Search Ranking With Your Domain Name

May 24th, 2010

In the process of building this blog over the last 5 years I’ve spent some time studying how to get top ranking for a the search terms “real estate photography” and “real estate photographer”. One thing I noticed early on was that real estate photographer Bill Bayless (realestatephotographer.us) was very hard to beat in the [...]

Will The Availability Of Quality Adobe Lens Correction Profiles Be a Problem?

May 23rd, 2010

For real estate photographers straightening verticals and removing lens distortion (mostly barrel distortion) is a big deal. For those that use Aperture and Lightroom traditionally, this step in the workflow has required a “round-trip” to PTlens, Photoshop or Photoshop Elements for every image you need to correct manually. The advent of  the lens correction technology [...]

How to Make DVD Slideshows For Home Sellers and Buyers

May 18th, 2010

Home sellers and buyers love to get home tours on DVD. For many years I gave all our listing customers and buyers of our listings a copy of 360 tours of their home on a CD. The CD’s I created were Windows only so the problem I ran into was that when we had a listing seller [...]

Sky Replacement Tutorial And Some Down Under Skys

May 17th, 2010

My friend Vince deStefano down in Melbourne, AU just sent me a link to his free sky replacement library and his YouTube video tutorial on how to do sky replacement. I’m going to add Vince’s library and tutorial to the PFRE blog Resource page. Vince and his Propertysnaps real estate photography business are a real [...]

Resources For Learning to Light with Small Flash

May 16th, 2010

I get a lot of questions about resources for learning how to use speedlites. Lighting with small flash is a hugely popular subject. As an example Scott Hargis’s post on Interior lighting with multiple strobes, is the most popular post on this blog. The only page, other than the front page that gets more traffic is [...]

Photoshop CS5: Do you Need It For Real Estate Photography?

May 9th, 2010

A couple of days ago the FedEx guy brought my Photoshop CS5 update. While I was loading the update I was thinking about the fact that the day is fast approaching that applications like Lightroom and Aperture are are going to take over post processing for real estate photographers. I get every Photoshop update as [...]

Television Premiere of VISUAL ACOUSTICS May 24 on Sundance Channel

May 6th, 2010

The television premiere of VISUAL ACOUSTICS is May 24th at 8:30 p.m. on Sundance Channel. More information can be found HERE. Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, VISUAL ACOUSTICS celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the world’s greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream. Shulman, who passed away last year, captured [...]

PolePixie: Making Elevated Real Estate Photography With a Painters Pole Easy

May 4th, 2010

I’m a big advocate of using a painters pole to get some extra elevation on your front exterior shots (see: this this post and these posts ). You can use a light weight camera and a painter’s pole, that you can find in any hardware store, to get your camera 10 to 15 feet in [...]

Preview of Lens Correction Solution for Camera Raw 6 and Lightroom 3

May 3rd, 2010

This is a subject that should pique the intrest of all real estate photographers! See Tom Hogarty’s post on this subject here.

Woopra: Awesome Live Website Tracking & Analytics

May 2nd, 2010

On the flight over to Hawaii last week, I was listening to the This Week In Photography Podcast. They had an interview with John P, the CEO of woopra.com, and I was so impressed with the woopra live website tracking that I immediately signed up and installed woopra on PhotographyForRealEstate.net and started using it. The [...]