Photography For Real Estate

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 (frequently [...]

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 each [...]

In my last post on social media, I talked about social media from the point of view of how I use it (and don’t use it) to promote this blog. Promoting a geographically focused small business like real estate photography is very different problem.
Here is the marketing problem that real estate photographers have:

Your potential clients [...]

A couple of days ago the FedEx guy brought my Photoshop CS5 update. While I was loading the update I was thinking about the fact that the day is fast approaching that applications like Lightroom and Aperture are are going to take over post processing for real estate photographers. I get every Photoshop update as [...]

There are many real estate photographers that have realized that shooting a series of bracketed exposures and using the Exposure Fusion (EF) feature in Photomatix or one of the many other EF applications is a quick and easy way to getting good quality interior shots. Not as high a quality as multiple off camera flashes [...]

I got a question recently on e-mail marketing that made me realize that even though I’ve talked about the basics of e-mail marketing I’ve never pointed out why you don’t want to do e-mail marketing through your regular e-mail provider. Here’s why you want to use a e-mail marketing service that is designed for e-mail [...]

I’ve promised several readers that I would update my popular two year old post that talks about what the important considerations are for choosing best entry level camera for real estate photography. Here are what I think are the most important considerations:

Consider ultra wide-angle glass first: For real estate photography the range of effective focal [...]

McAllen,TX Realtor, Lee Jinks pointed out to me that the newly announced FinePix HS10 would be a great camera for real estate shooting. Indeed, it does! It seems like the toughest thing to find in compact cameras is a wide enough lens. The HS10 has a 24mm, effective, lens; very workable for shooting interiors.  In [...]

This last week I gotten several questions about the basics of real estate photography like “should I use autofocus?”, “what should I do about reflections from my flash?”, “should I increase the ISO if there isn’t enough light?”. “should I use RAW or JPG?” So I thought it would be useful to step through some [...]

I had an insightful conversation last night with a highly successful portrait photographer (lets call him Jim) that has been struggling, unsuccessfully, during the last 12 months to break into real estate photography.
Even though Jim’s real estate work is jaw dropping good, from what I could tell he has just not connecting with the top [...]

Scott Hargis just put up a excellent tutorial on his blog on how to keep your verticals from converging.
Scott’s main point is if you are not diligent about keeping your verticals from converging, nobody will take you serious as a professional interior photographer. Scott goes through a step by step  8 minute tutorial on how [...]