Photography For Real Estate

Several things have got me thinking about this subject lately: I’ve seen several real estate photographers websites recently where the presentation of the gallery images detracts from the impact of the images. This principle is my 10th essential of my 10 essentials of real estate photography and I’m rewriting this section in the third edition [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been talking to a lot of real estate photographers just starting the business recently and the subject of a portfolio website comes up as one of the very first subjects of discussion. Your portfolio of real estate images is at the center of your marketing. Your website is just an accessible way to present your business [...]

For those of you that have Scott Hargis’s Lighting Interiors eBook or have been hanging out in the PFRE flickr group for any amount of time, you understand why Nikon SB-80dx manual flashes are THE small flash of choice for real estate photographers so move along, there’s nothing here for you. However, the questions I’ve [...]

I’ve come to the conclusion that all you need to track your business financials is a few good spreadsheet templates. Here’s what’s lead me to this conclusion. At beginning of this year at our house we went through a traumatic upgrade from a 2004 version of QuickBooks to QuickBooks 2011. My wife Levi, the accountant in the [...]

A few days ago I visited cambridgeincolour.com which I haven’t been to in years. I went there looking for some good quality online resources for a online Digital Photography class that I’m building for my local high school Technical School. I remember being impressed with the quality of the photography tutorials the last time I was [...]

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 [...]

I’ve revised, updated and expanded my free Guide to Using Photography in Real Estate Marketing For Realtors and Home Sellers. This is the third edition of the two page guide that I first released in June of 2009. It’s purpose is to help everyone educate agents on why photography is important for marketing real estate. I’ve [...]

Today Canon announced a couple of new low-end HDSLRs. The EOS T3 /1100D and the EOS T3i/600D. In reading the new specs it’s pretty hard to find any earth shaking changes (except perhaps the swivel LCD screen on the T3i). Moore’s law slowly keeps grinding on toward fantastic quality, smaller size and lower cost. What’s else [...]

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 [...]

I’ve always been amazed by how many full blown Photoshop features you get in Photoshop Elements for around 1/10th the price of Photoshop CS5. The new Photoshop Elements version 9 released in Sept of this year takes this concept to the next level. PSE9 now has layer masks, content-aware fill, refine-edge, and improved panorama stitching. [...]

Last week I got a question about MLS copyright rules. It reminded me that I haven’t talked about this subject in over a year. I’ve done a lot of posts on this subject in the past but I think It’s worthwhile bringing it up again. The basic issue is this: MLSs syndicate all their listing [...]

I believe the current high unemployment rate is creating an opportunity for some of you well established real estate photographers out there that are complaining about the amount of work they have to do! You could become a “Dynamic Duo”. In 4+ years of doing this blog and talking to hundreds of real estate photographers no one [...]

I talk to a lot of agents and real estate photographers that are struggling to get started using video to market their listings  and themselves in a meaningful way. I’ve been talking to to John Sembrot the last couple days who was generous and brave enough to share his first try at doing video with [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Back in early July when I did a couple of posts on real estate video Scott Cooper made a comment on a post I did about a year ago on The Bare Essentials for getting Started in Real Estate Photography. Scott is getting started in real estate video and wanted me to do a post [...]

A reader recently told me, “I know you don’t think the 14mm (full frame) lens is suitable for RE work, but I have found that to be quite the opposite! I have the Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 lens (the finest lens I have ever owned hands down for RE work!!) & I use it @ 14mm [...]

Steve Hong has a really nice walk through of Google Analytics on the PFRE flickr group that is worth while going through. Everyone with a web site or blog should be using Google Analytics. It’s free and easy to use. The way it works is you sign-up for a free analytics account and then for [...]