April 29th, 2011
From the HuffingtonPost: It’s been more than a week after Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service went down, taking sites like Reddit, Quora and Foursquare with it. Amazon is finally issuing an apology and in-depth explanation on how and why the cloud service failed so spectacularly. Read the whole article here. This was the same outage that [...]
April 28th, 2011
Regular PFRE blog readers will remember Jacob McNeil and Jaimie Walker from Naniamo, BC. I did a couple of posts on their work back in 2010… here and here. Jamie and Jacob went down to Brisbane in early February for a Propvid bootcamp and to learn the PlatinumHD Propvid approach to property video. I really feel [...]
April 27th, 2011
Allan MacKenzie was showing me an infomercial video that he did recently about an iPad 40 day promotion that a real estate office in Brisbane was offering. The budget was $700, the video is 45 sec’s in length. Allan dropped in the video that displays on the iPads with an effect called garbage matte and [...]
April 26th, 2011
In real estate photography the front exterior shot is THE most important shot. Why? Because a thumbnail of the front exterior shot needs to have the visual power to grab the attention of the home buyer scanning through lists of listings on real estate sites and entice them to look at the listing further. On most [...]
April 25th, 2011
Now that real estate photographers can straighten verticals and remove barrel distortion in Lightroom 3 the only reason they need Photoshop or Photoshop Elements any more is to mask windows or replace skys right? If they had layers in Lightroom and Aperture then they wouldn’t need Photoshop! This is onOne Software’s line of thinking. So [...]
April 24th, 2011
Note: that this post is by Iran Watson a Realtor/real estate photographer in the North Metro Atlanta area. One of the most frequently asked questions I get is how I use the “Flash/Ambient Hybrid” technique when photographing interiors. Although it sounds somewhat complicated on the surface, the concept is really quite simple. The execution, however, [...]
April 21st, 2011
Back on April 4 I did a post on wireless tethering of your DSLR to and iPad. At the time of that post you needed to have a wireless network available to get an Eye-Fi Pro X2 (located in your DSLR) to talk to an iPad. Today Eye-Fi released a software update for the Pro [...]
April 20th, 2011
Yesterday I talked to Michal Pecek who’s is starting a real estate photography business in Bratislava, Slovakia. I had to brush up on my geography to locate Bratislava. Bratislava is in southwestern Slovakia on both banks of the Danube River. Bordering Austria and Hungary. For some reason I am continually amazed how much real estate and the real [...]
April 19th, 2011
Malia Campbell just stopped Salem by on her 15 hour drive up I-5 from Oakland to Seattle this evening and we discussed real estate photography, property video and enjoyed some Thai food. I was telling Malia that I really liked the video that she is doing lately. I especially liked the video she shot while [...]
April 18th, 2011
John Quarles, of Birmingham, AL who is on a quest for the best way to host his property videos pointed out to me last week that the SlideshowPro.com Director hosting is a very useable and inexpensive way to host property video and slide shows that you want viewable on any computer or mobile device. This [...]
April 17th, 2011
Peggy Taylor, of Tampa Bay, FL left a comment on last Thursday’s post that is just too important not to highlight for everyone. First some background. About a month ago I did a post on Peggy’s work because she was featured on agentgenius.com. Many PFRE blog readers complained at Peggy because she was charging $99 [...]
April 14th, 2011
I recently had a discussion with a real estate photographer that is struggling to get his business started. I was challenging his $75 pricing. And he was telling me that he has spent the last year or so friending about 250 local agents on Facebook and then offered them all a $50 shoot for their [...]
April 13th, 2011
Last night in Las Vegas at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention, Apple announced Final Cut Pro X. This announcement is a big deal for FCP users since FCP hasn’t had a major update in 2 years and the current version is still 32 bit and doesn’t take advantage of Snow Leopards’ 64 bit architecture. The [...]
April 12th, 2011
Doing quick Photoshop masks for sky replacement or window replacement on interior shots is a frequent need that real estate photographers have. I created this video a number of years ago but have had several situations recently that people wanted to mask interior windows. The crux of creating such masks is that the mask edges [...]
April 11th, 2011
Brett Clemments and his crew at PlatinumHD.tv are experimenting with creatives ways to create video that “sinks the emotional hook” and get’s buyer’s attention just like other forms of video ads. In this, video the PlatinumHD crew directs two agents (Lucas Wilson and Natalie Poteri) in a short dramatic comedy written on the spot. The [...]
April 10th, 2011
After doing the post last week on the essentials you need to get started in real estate photography, I got several requests to do a similar post on real estate video. So I asked Allan MacKenzie of Xander Video who teaches workshops on real estate video to help me put together the following list of [...]
April 7th, 2011
Just a reminder that the April PFRE photographer of the month images are now posted at the PFRE Photographer of the monty flickr group and are ready for your voting. No more submissions are allowed. To vote you need to join the flickr group and a comment is considered a vote. Please only two votes (comments) per [...]
April 6th, 2011
I discovered Julie Kinnear, a Toronto agent that does her own video walk through tours, about a year ago when she made a comment on the blog. The reason I want to comment on Julie’s video’s is many have pointed out that the dramatic life style videos that I’ve reviewed here are out of place for [...]
April 5th, 2011
I have been eyeing the Eye-Fi Pro X2 SD card for a while now. The idea of having wifi build into your memory card is kind of cool. The feature that pushed me over the edge to buy one is the promise of wirelessly tethering my 5DMKII to my iPad. This video at fstoppers.com demonstrates the way [...]
April 4th, 2011
This last week I was talking with Michael Pelzer of Uneek Luxury Tours. Michael says he been shooting video seriously for about a year and getting inspiration from the video work he’s been seeing by other real estate videographers on the PFRE blog. Michael has been shooting on a retainer for Sotheby’s International in Central [...]
