Photography For Real Estate

I ran across this video today and I can’t help but comment on the issue of “dirty whites” in HDR processing. The shots in this video are a great illustration of the issue of “dirty whites” that real estate photographers run into. Notice how the whites and other lighter colors in most of the interior [...]

I was watching The Tech Guy podcast this afternoon and was please to find that Leo had Trey Ratcliff from StuckInCustoms.com on the show. For those of you that don’t recognize Trey’s name, Trey is one of the top practitioners and spokesmen for HDR these days. His work is very popular and he wrote the book, [...]

This last week we’ve had three new post processing products that are of interest to real estate photographers announced. Since I’ve had an unusually busy week last week I’ve not had time to use any of these three products but I’m in the process of trying them out. The three products are:
HDR Expose by Unified [...]

In Part 1 of this post I showed examples of the fact that three, brackets are not always enough to capture the full dynamic range in a scene. And posed the question, “how do you make sure you capture the full dynamic range?”
There are several methods:

Shoot more brackets than you need: With this method, you [...]

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 did a post last August on HDR Studio when unifiedcolor.com released their Windows only version.
They recently released a Mac version and temporally reduced their price from $149 to $99.
I’ve downloaded the 30 day trial version and have been using it for a few days. I have to say there is much to like about HDR [...]

A couple of days ago Milia Campbell (TulipChain Photography and TulipChain flickr handle) pointed out to me that we should have a separate flickr group for HDR and Blending in real estate so that all the there would be a separate place to post and discuss HDR and Blended images.
As you know if you’ve been [...]

I  just discovered that HDRsoft announced Photomatix Light back on Dec 15, 2009. This slipped passed me because I’ve been depending on HDRsoft e-mails that announce new versions. I didn’t get one this time. Maybe it’s because I nitpicked the way the first version of their Lightroom plugin worked. I’ll be nice.
What Photomatix Light is, [...]

In his article titled “A Plea for HDR” on Luminous-landscape.com Alexandre Buisse says “The technique (HDR) has indeed a very bad press, especially in the “fine art” community, and to be fair, much of the criticism is justified. But the point I would like to make here is that, well used, it can be very [...]

A couple of months ago there was an outstanding thread in the PFRE Discussion group discussing various approaches on how to get clean whites when shooting HDR. This thread caught my attention because getting clean whites when shooting HDR is a classic problem that many beginning real estate  photographers struggle with.
fuzzybabybunny:) starts out the thread [...]

Marcus Newey pointed out an interesting new remote device that will do HDR bracketing the way you want. Some of the features are:

Replaces and extends manufacturer-specific remote controls.
Allows for unparalleled flexibility with automatic >30 second exposures in “bulb mode” – even in HDR sequences.
Advanced easy-to-configure “Time-Lapse Mode” with optional sequence start delay.
Optional user-defined Mirror-Up timeout [...]

I came across this video (sorry about the ad… first time I’ve seen ads on youtube videos) by Patrick Norton and Roger Chang of Revision3 the other day that besides being a decent basic introduction to HDR talks about an  open source HDR processing application called Qtpfsgui. This is the first time I’d heard of [...]

The last week or so I’ve been talking to Igor Tryndin, the CTO of www.unifiedcolor.com, about their HDRStudio product. Even though HDRstudio is still a Windows only product, Igor convinced me to give it a try.
I’ve not used HDRstudio enough to form a strong opinion of it but I have used it on several images [...]

Today HDRsoft announced Photomatix Pro version 3.2. This upgrade is available for download from:

http://www.hdrsoft.com/download/win.html (Windows)
http://www.hdrsoft.com/download/mac.html (Mac)

The main updates in version 3.2 are:

Last month Pentax announced the K7. The K7 is the first camera that has honest to goodness tone mapping built-in to it’s microcode. When you put it in HDR mode and click the shutter it shoots 3 to 5 exposures +/-2EV and then after about 10 seconds out pops a JPG that’s been tone mapped. [...]