August 31st, 2011
It’s now September 1 GMT so the voting for the August PFRE Photographer of the month is over. Congratulations to Linda Sabiston from the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, CA. This win makes Linda a two time winner of the PFRE photographer of the month because Linda won back in August of 2008 when we [...]
August 30th, 2011
If you have Photoshop CS5 and do real estate photography you should know about how to use the puppet warp feature to straighten walls in architectural photos. Thanks to Jeff for sending me this video! I’d never paid much attention to puppet warp but it is a really cool feature. Note that this feature was [...]
August 29th, 2011
Mike Kelley sent me this tutorial video that illustrates his compositing technique for adding extra drama to twilight shots. Mike describes his technique as follows: The technique is pretty simple but gives great results. I have my camera set up on a tripod with a remote, and Pocketwizards connecting the camera to the flash in [...]
August 28th, 2011
About 10 months ago when it first came on the market I did a post on the LightTrac iPhone App. The guys from LightTrac saw the post and are now going to give PFRE readers some free copies of LightTrac as a promo for their up coming version 2.2 for the iPhone/iPad. See below on [...]
August 24th, 2011
Estella Sneider, a real estate photographer who works the Beverly Hills area sent me this link recently to the Wall Street Journal article that she got on a listing that she shot in the Beverly Park neighborhood. You’ll have to forgive me for listing this post in the Humor category. But there is just too [...]
August 23rd, 2011
Just yesterday I was accused of not having a anything on the blog or in my book about preparing photos for the MLS. This post will fix the blog part and I’ll make sure I have similar material in my book in the update that is coming soon. There are a bunch of discussion threads [...]
August 22nd, 2011
This post by Scott Hargis in 2007 is one of the all time most popular posts on this blog. It’s popularity, I’m sure, is due to the fact that he explains his technique of multiple off-camera small flashes. Almost everyone is interested in this subject. It turns out that just a few months before the [...]
August 21st, 2011
Spending the rest of the month of August here at Lake Tahoe soaking up some rays and fresh mountain air. We are renting this awesome lake front property for our family reunion. When I arrived Friday here, I decided to see what property here on the lake is going for so I brought up my [...]
August 18th, 2011
Monday (August 15th) Snapsort.com relaunched with a bunch of nice updates that helps you compare camera specifications. Things to take note of are: Instantly explore the world of cameras based on your unique criteria. This isn’t a list, snapsort.com uses AI to recommend the best camera for you. All the data is in one place. [...]
August 17th, 2011
Today Heath Cowart of Brevard, NC told me about a class that he and his brother put on recently for their broker clients. Here is Heath’s description: The class was called “Mastering the Virtual Face to Face Meeting“. We called it this because we are using video to give brokers an opportunity to communicate face to [...]
August 16th, 2011
Peter Brandt, a long time PFRE blog reader is interested in Architectural images as art. Peter has been a commercial photographer for 45 years and has shot architecture in Miami, London, Las Vegas, and Montreal. He has shot fashion, advertising and even shot for Playboy magazine. In recent years his interests have moved to photographing [...]
August 15th, 2011
Scott Hargis posted a great tutorial on his blog today on composition for interiors. Malia Campbell shot the video for the tutorial. I think this is a clever way to talk about and illustrate photo composition. Malia frames the shot with video that Scott is talking about while Scott walks around in the video pointing [...]
August 14th, 2011
Recall that we saw a rough prerelease video of this Ballin Downs horse property near Brisbane, AU. Brett Clements just gave me the link to the final cut of this video. There are a total of three videos used to market this property: The story (this one) The straight video The aerials First of all [...]
August 11th, 2011
Here is a great Webinar, hosted by Photoshelter.com and presented by Blake Discher, Detroit-based freelance photographer, specializing in editorial, advertising, annual reports, and portraits. Even though Blake isn’t talking about specifically about real estate photography, most all of his insights apply to creating a profitable business in real estate photography. The webinar video is just under 60 [...]
August 10th, 2011
In the last two weeks I’ve run across several people that are hosting video on their sites with QuickTime. Bad idea! Here is the problem with using QuickTime for anything on the web: QuickTime is an old Apple technology that never caught on on PCs so Windows machines can’t display movies in QuickTime format without [...]
August 9th, 2011
David Eichler showed me the post on his blog about a recent shoot that he did for Ken DeLeon of Keller Williams in Palo Alto, California, who is on track to be the number one real estate agent in the US this year, in terms of dollar volume. Here is the property web site for this listing. David [...]
August 8th, 2011
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing some coaching of beginning real estate photographers using various forms of video conferencing and I’ve been amazed by how effective video conferencing is. I’ve used Skype and Gotomeeting.com for my coaching sessions. Skype has been unreliable in many instances but Gotomeeting, which just added HD video to their [...]
August 7th, 2011
We now have a set of 16 entries for the August PFRE photographer of the month ready for your voting at the PFRE Photographer of the month flickr group. To view the images click on the slideshow image to the right and be sure click the fullscreen mode. To vote you need to join the flickr group if [...]
August 5th, 2011
Several people have said that they are surprised that I don’t use Facebook. Linda Clements (Brett’s wife) reprimanded me for not having Like buttons on posts and eBook landing pages etc. I know, I know, I’m sure that if I was more active on Facebook that it would generate some traffic but I just don’t feel right in my [...]
August 4th, 2011
Up until just a few days ago Vimeo’s terms of service did not allow commercial use video. I know, I got my Vimeo account shut down for posting real estate video about a year ago. They just recently launched Vimeo Pro, which is $199/year. My understanding of Vimeo Pro is that you can now host [...]
