January 31st, 2011
Last Tuesday Google casually announced on it’s Chromium Blog that it would be phasing out Chrome support for H.264, the video codec and standard supported by Adobe Flash, Blu-ray, Internet Explorer, Safari and others. Instead, it will be supporting WebM and Ogg Theora, which are supported by Mozilla and Opera. Ever since this announcement the [...]
January 30th, 2011
Today Bill26 of Broomfield, CO (just North of Denver) became the 5000th PFRE flickr group member. Bill says, I am married with a three-year-old (on my lap right now – difficult to type). I have been a serious amateur for several years, mostly in landscapes. However, in the last year or so I have become interested [...]
January 28th, 2011
Kudos to St Paul MN Realtor®, Teresa Boardman, for her article in InmanNews titled “Take better listing photos, or don’t take them at all“. Teresa gives a tongue-in-cheek description of what agents should do with their point-and-shoot camera or cell phone camera they may be using to shoot listings with… break it with a sledge hammer! [...]
January 27th, 2011
I’ve gotten many questions in the last month or two about how creating quality YouTube videos. Questions like why do my YouTube videos look so crappy? Let me start by saying that traditionally people that create video tend to gravitate to Macs. There’s a simple reason for that: Every Mac comes with iMovie 11 which [...]
January 26th, 2011
Wow, I noticed today that David Hobby announced a fantastic sounding workshop tour of 29 cities that David is doing with Joe McNally starting in Seattle on 3/11 and ending in St Louis on 4/18. The tour will be in 29 US cities. Sounds awesome! Here is the tour website that has all the details. [...]
January 25th, 2011
Steve Fuller of Kelowna, BC recently pointed out to me that after many years of using the Sigma 10-20 f/4-5.6 that he was moving to the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8. The Tokina 11-16mm lens is specifically designed for APS-C sensors (cropped sensor DSLRs). It’s been on the market since about 2008. This lens is available in [...]
January 24th, 2011
I had a situation today in which I deleted a readers comments and it made me realize I need to talk about my comment moderation guidelines. My basic moderation guidelines have evolved out of the fact that in the last year I have had a few people that have exhibited troll like behavior in the blog [...]
January 23rd, 2011
In Oct 2009 I did a post on QR Codes. Before that I’d never even heard of the things. You can see from the comments on that post there was a fair amount of skepticism about QR codes in general and why real estate photographers should even care. QR code technology has become popular in [...]
January 20th, 2011
In the last week I’ve had four discussions with people concerning some aspect of being both a real estate agent and a real estate photographer. I find when a subject like this pops up out of the blue from a bunch of different people I usually indicates a trend going on. There were four different [...]
January 19th, 2011
Wow, the response to the post I did last Friday on How Do Your Real Estate Tours And Slide Shows Look On The iPad? demonstrated there is a lot of energy out there on this subject. I thought it may be useful to show an example of a cool little slide show building product that [...]
January 18th, 2011
Brett Clements points out that Brisbane, Australia has a bunch more waterfront property than it did just a few weeks ago. This Platinum HD video promotes Mark Creevey and Tony Williams who specialize in dealing with conditions in a down market. I suspect that they’ll be popular agents in Brisbane for a while. I can’t [...]
January 17th, 2011
I wanted to point out that Scott Hargis and his work was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle last Sunday. The portraits used in the article are by Malia Campbell. Notice the great analogy that Scott makes in the beginning of the article between “looking hot” on match.com and “looking hot” on a real estate listing [...]
January 16th, 2011
As a result last monday’s post on how to find real estate photography customers I got questions on what to do when you find the top listing agents. The next step in your marketing is to understand how to talk to listing agents. The two top things listing agents are interested in is 1) Selling [...]
January 14th, 2011
Our thoughts and best wishes are with our mates in Queensland Trying To Keep Their Head Above Water! Just got a note from Brett Clements. Brett says, “we’re in a bit of shit at the moment. Our Capital, and our State is underwater. We’re trying real hard to get our head above water”. You can [...]
January 13th, 2011
Real estate agents and real estate photographers need to be taking the time to find out how their slide shows and home tours look on the iPad. Why? Because iPads don’t run Flash (which most real estate slide shows and tours are based on) and Apple sold between 11 and 13 million iPads in 2010. [...]
January 12th, 2011
Scott just told me today that he’ll be doing a 4 day series of his lighting workshops in Vancouver, BC Feb 26th through Mar 1. Find all the details and register at the Vancouver Photo Workshop site. Scott does a great workshop. I attended one of his first ones several years ago and it was great [...]
January 11th, 2011
Over at PFREtour.com we’ve been getting requests from agents that are looking for photographers in various geographic locations that will shoot a PFREtour for them. So I’ve decided to offer active PFREtour.com users (pfretour.com users with 10 or more active tours) a free listing in the World Wide Real Estate Photographer Directory. This will allow [...]
January 10th, 2011
As a student of video I’m always on the look out for good information sources on video and shooting video. I recently noticed an article at dpreview.com by Uwe Steinmueller titled, Understanding Compression, Codecs, and Transcoding. A lot of good geeky video stuff to get your teeth into in this article but at the bottom it [...]
January 9th, 2011
Knowing how to shot interiors is just one part of the real estate photography business. The other 60% of the job is finding real estate photography customers and convincing them that your great photography can help them sell their listings. One of the key things you need to understand about finding customers is you don’t [...]
January 6th, 2011
If you are a Mac user you’ve probably already noticed that the new Mac App Store launched today. You have to update to Mac OS 10.6.6 to access the Mac App Store. Just do a “software update” and it will download and install. The Mac App Store looks and works much like iTunes but is [...]
