Photography For Real Estate

Tourbuzz Full Browser Mode: I pointed out earlier that Tourbuzz was doing some updates to their tour product. In the final release they have a new feature I really like. They call it “full browser” mode. Very cool! They essentially remove all the branding stuff and make the photos fill up the whole browser window [...]

I had a request to do an article on shooting twilight exterior architectural photos. I realized that I’ve never written a complete summary of the process of shooting a exterior twilight shot.
First of all, doing a twilight shoot is almost always a special trip so most real estate photographers list a separate price for doing [...]

In the process of working on a chapter of my e-book covering interior composition I came across a couple of shots of a little condo we sold last year that nicely illustrates the pros and cons of a three wall shot compared to a two wall shot.
The upper shot on the right, is effectively a [...]

Check out David Gibbons’s example, over at geekestateblog.com, of a time lapse video of Elliott bay in Seattle, that he shot with his D70, PowerBook G4, Nikon Capture.
What a great idea! I’m thinking that Canon shooters should be able to do this same thing with Canon’s RemoteCapture software. I’m going to try this out with [...]

Tim Armes recently announced his latest version of Lightroom/Enfuse 3.0. For those of you that are not familiar with LR/Enfuse take a look at my post back in March of this year on LR/Enfuse. In summary, LR/Enfuse is a Lightroom plug-in that provides a convenient interface onto the open source Enfuse application, which provides [...]

I’ve been working hard this summer on the second edition of my Photography For Real Estate e-book. I’m going to make several improvements in both the content and the way I distribute this e-book:

I’ve had several comments and questions about my blog header image that’s along the top of the blog now so I thought I’d do a post on the story behind this image since it is one of my favorite images.
First of all thanks Shaun for pointing out that the original image that came with this [...]

Thanks to Dave Moore studios for pointing out the atticfirearchitecture.com site.
Atticfire is an architectural photography team working out of Savanna, Georgia that claims to shoot 8 spaces a day (5 shots above the industry standard). Remember, this is not real estate photography this is architectural photography where 3 spaces a day is the standard because [...]

Lots of good comments on the last post about straightening walls. There are several of the comments that are worth expanding on.
The best way is to get the wall right while shooting. Absolutely, do everything you can to get the walls straight while shooting like using a tripod and using the right and left [...]

I have found my mission in life and it is to make sure all the walls in real estate marketing photos do not have converging verticals!
There is something about making walls straight that is hard for photographers to get. Apparently, it just isn’t obvious that walls like the ones above detract from an image. [...]

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Realtor Norm Fisher has put together a hilarious presentation on how unbelievably bad real estate photography can get. The “hold on, I think we are going over” shot is my favorite.
If you watch the presentation to the end you’ll see that this “tour” does more than show bad photos, it is a promotion [...]

M. James Northen sent me an example of a shot that he used Photomatix to get. M.J. says:
“An immediate results technique is photomatix HDR image for problem exteriors …. North facing homes are a bitch. Sun just never seems right. A gorilla ladder – 11’ up including human standing on the ladder – tripod [...]

M. James Northen made some appropriate observations. My recent posts that give some references to info about the fine points of rather involved interior lighting should not be miss construed to mean that this is the way real estate photography is approached. On the contrary real estate photography must be done on a time scale [...]

You may have noticed that back on the Scott Hargis tutorial on how to light a room in the comments Geoff Wilson recommended the LightSource Podcast (E041) that features an interview with Interior and Architectural Photographer Nathanael Bennett. I listened to the Podcast and also recommend it. The interview features:

Getting started in architectural photography
[...]

The last few days I’ve been talking to Michael Asgian who owns www.panostar.com. Michael showed me a recent series of work that he did for a “sophisticated” client who was looking for a very specific “heavy look” in photos to market their home. These photos will be used in a historical home magazine. When I [...]