February 1st, 2012
Scott Hargis and Malia Campbell have been working hard for many months on the video version of Scott’s LightingForRealEstatePhotography video series. Yesterday Malia announced that they are giving away 5 free subscriptions to this new video series. To enter this competition send a video link to the address below telling them what you want to [...]
January 26th, 2012
Today Scott Hargis and Malia Campbell announced the video version of Scott’s Lighting workshop that they have been working hard on for many months is nearing completion and will go live on March 1. This YouTube video is a little ad for the series. This will be another great way to learn Scott’s lighting technique. [...]
November 14th, 2011
Thanks to Harry Lim in Orlando, FL for pointing this video out to me. This is a meticulous demonstration by Roger Brooks, a Architectural and Interior Photographer in Vancouver, BC demonstrating a lighting/post process layering technique commonly used in high-end Architectural Interior photography. Note that I show it here as an educational illustration of how many Architectural [...]
October 18th, 2011
On October 14, 2011 Scott Hargis and I celebrated the anniversary of Scott’s Lighting Interiors eBook; as much as we could with Scott in California and me in Oregon. By any standard, Lighting Interiors is a huge success. It continues to sell well all over the world. Scott has managed to distill his small flash lighting [...]
September 12th, 2011
I just discovered that late last month while I was on vacation, Kelby Media Group announced the launch of Light It a iPad magazine on lighting. Publisher Scott Kelby talks about Light It in this video and also has a Q&A about the launch on his blog. I downloaded the free premiere issue and I like the look [...]
September 4th, 2011
John Quarles asked an interesting question: When I use flash, I normally use the SU-4 mode or the older Pocket Wizards with a Nikon D3. I do a lot of large homes and spend most of my time running around adjusting the power levels when I use flash. On night photography I may use 6 [...]
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 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 [...]
July 7th, 2011
Since I’ve been working on updating my Photography For Real Estate eBook I’ve been thinking about the changes that have been going on in real estate photography lighting the last few years. Back in 2008 I did a poll of what lighting techniques real estate photographers were using. That poll (the 6 poll down on [...]
June 27th, 2011
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 [...]
March 22nd, 2011
Yesterday I was talking to Sandy Hegyi who shoots real estate on the British Columbia Sunshine Coast. Sandy’s background is 25 years lighting interiors for big budget film and television productions. Sandy was a Chief Lighting Technician and is used to working with 5 assistants, a ten ton truck of lighting gear with 200,000 watts [...]
February 28th, 2011
Today as I was surfing around looking for something completely else I ran across a couple of well done video tutorials on basic small flash gear and jargon. Both are by Paul Duncan. Here they are: Shutter/Flash Synchronization Strobist Preliminaries There is a ton of basic information packed into these little videos. If you are interested [...]
January 5th, 2011
Mike Miriello over at realestatephotographypodcast.com recently interviewed Scott Hargis about his e-book, Lighting Interiors – Techniques for lighting with small flash. Scott talks about the content of the e-book and his philosophy of shooting light and fast with small flashes and about the fact that this ebook covers the fundamentals and theory of flash. Also, about [...]
January 4th, 2011
There are a bunch of folks purchasing the Lighting Interiors e-book by Scott Hargis since it was David Hobby added it to his Strobist Bookshelf. In the book Scott talks about using SLK SVD-20 video tripods as lighting stands. He also mentions that the SLK tripods are not manufactured any more. So I thought it would [...]
October 22nd, 2010
Jamie Flournoy, a San Francisco Bay area Realtor, who purchased Scott Hargis’s Lighting Interiors eBook asked me this morning if she could use her Canon 580EX II with Pocket Wizards like Scott describes in the Figure 2.5 diagram (on pg 18 – click the image to the right for a larger view) that shows how [...]
September 21st, 2010
For the last several days I’ve been talking to Bill Silver, a Realtor in Harwich Port, MA who specializes in Cape Cod vacation properties. Bill does all his own photography and uses some unique and innovative techniques. After the first tour Bill showed me I noticed that his photography had a distinctive look. It took [...]
August 26th, 2010
I’m amazed by the number of people I talk to that are mixing flash with the bracketing shots they are shooting for Exposure Fusion (Blending in Photomatix) and HDR. Plus I’ve gotten a number of questions asking how to to shoot brackets with flash. The first question is why? What’s the point of using flash [...]
May 16th, 2010
I get a lot of questions about resources for learning how to use speedlites. Lighting with small flash is a hugely popular subject. As an example Scott Hargis’s post on Interior lighting with multiple strobes, is the most popular post on this blog. The only page, other than the front page that gets more traffic is [...]
October 19th, 2009
I was having a discussion with reader “Uncle Louis” the last few days about alternatives for inexpensive manual flashes. Louis was complaining that he was having trouble finding the old Nikon classic manual flashes (SB-80dx and SB-26) that are so popular with real estate photographers. For the new comers, these flashes are popular because they [...]
