Photography For Real Estate

My friend Charles Mackenzie-Hill in Marbella, Spain recently pointed out that I should point out PhilipBloom.net to everyone. Yes, Charles, you’re right. I’m remise for not pointing out Philips site to readers before this. As a student of Cinematography Philip’s DVDs from Fstopacademy.com were one of the first things I purchased after purchasing my 5DMkII. [...]

You can listen to the podcast by clicking above or click here to subscribe in iTunes. In this Q & A Podcast Mike and I discuss the following questions: From Ted: What product do you deliver to the customer and how do you deliver it? From Chris: How do I approach a shoot when shooting [...]

Mike Miriello and I recorded another Q&A Podcast a few days ago. One of the questions that Mike and I talked about was the old question about how to deliver photos to your client and whether or not to deliver a physical CD. I think there are two distinct phases of a real estate photography [...]

I’m amazed by the number of people I talk to that are mixing flash with the bracketing shots they are shooting for Exposure Fusion (Blending in Photomatix) and HDR. Plus I’ve gotten a number of questions asking how to to shoot brackets with flash. The first question is why? What’s the point of using flash [...]

A couple of weeks ago I promised not to do screen grabs of Google maps for land listings any more. Turns out you can do almost anything you want by building your own custom Google map. Here’s how it works. In the comments of this previous post Neil from Missouri pointed out that you can [...]

In the last few weeks I’ve had several questions relating to the basics of optically triggering flashes while shooting real estate. Scott Hargis did a post on PFRE  three years ago that is a concise summary of how to approach off camera flash when shooting real estate. However this post doesn’t mention the miracle of optical triggering [...]

Every once in a while Brett Clements shoots me links to show off what he and his team at Propvid Queensland are up to. As a student of video I love analyzing and studying the work the Propvid folks do.  I am continually impressed with their ingenuity. In this most recent video they take on the challenge [...]

This series of Bad MLS Photos is brought to you by John Cummins of HoustonHomeImages.com. This series demonstrates that the real estate photographer must always be aware of what’s going on both inside and outside when images are composed. Thanks John you made my day! Update Aug 24, 2010: This is a good lesson in [...]

Yesterday I noticed that Kris Bjarne Haug over at Papilios Real Estate Photography in the New Orleans-Baton Rouge area has some fantastic statistics that he is using in his marketing. With the help of  Latter & Blum, Inc (a broker site in the New Orleans- Baton Rouge area) Kris has compiled a months worth of traffic [...]

Mac users starting out in real estate photography are faced with a choice of whether to go with Lightroom or Aperture for photo management/editing. Back in February I did a comparison of of Lightroom and Aperture just after Aperture 3 was released. Now that both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 have been out for a [...]

Larry Andrew of Kansas City, Missouri posted a comment recently on a post I did back in Feb of this year titled “What Should I Charge for a Shoot?“. I the story that Larry relates is important enough I think it needs to be raised from the level of a comment on a 6 month [...]

Getting a home owner to prepare their home for a photography session is essential to getting good results but it’s more difficult to get through to some homeowners and agents than others. In my experience about 2 out of 10 homeowners require some special help in this area and some agents are prepared to help [...]

Iran Watson started a thread in the PFRE flickr group about shooting acreage so I jumped in and described how on a large land listing we had I had used Photoshop to make a put a transparent surveyors map layer over a Google satellite map layer so that buyers could see the vegetation, the streets and how the newly subdivided [...]

I was a bit shaken last week when a regular reader said, “a friend just put her house on the market and I was checking the PFRE blog looking for some of the articles about why good photography sells homes faster but no luck“. I thought I had proven this proposition beyond a reasonable doubt but perhaps I [...]

OK, I’m going to try this again. This time I’ve worked harder at being clear and concise. My previous post on this subject got too many people worked up and that was not my intent. There are no comments allowed on this post because the negative comments about any specific company can be damaging and [...]

The evening of August 2 we are upgrading how private branding on  PFREtour.com works. Here’s how it works: Real estate photographers that would like to have pfretours look like they are hosted by the real estate photographer now have a easy to use method to do that. You choose a available, unused domain that you’d [...]

I recently got an email from Atticfire that reminded me that I haven’t mentioned them for over a year. I first discovered the Atticfire site and did a post on it back in Oct of 2007. Since that time participants in the PFRE discussion group managed to reverse engineer how the Atticfire team creates the dramatic effect in their [...]