Photography For Real Estate

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 [...]

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 [...]

Mike Gardner from Malibu sent me one of his recent shoots of the Birdview Property that overlooks the beach at Malibu. Mike says that on this shoot he bracketed the white balance. That is, on each of the interior shots he made exposures with white balance set for the exterior (windows) and other exposures with [...]

A very real issue in real estate photography is perspective distortion. It comes up all the time because real estate photographers use wide angle lenses which are famous for two types of distortion: Barrel distortion: This is a lens defect prominent in ultra-wide zooms where straight lines near the edge of the image are curved. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

For those that may not have noticed Jeremy Esland’s thread in the PFRE flickr group recently, I think it is worth posting here again. This before and after gallery is from ampimage.com. The owner of the site, Ashley Morrison, specializes in interior and hotel photography. Ashley works with Marie McMillen an interior designer when shooting [...]

Using flash with HDR is becoming a very common technique. In this video real estate photographer Michael James demonstrates how he uses a Visual Echoes Better Beamer Flash Extender to light dark porch areas in exterior shots. While Michael is demonstrating this technique with HDR, there’s no reason this technique has to only be used [...]

Back in January I did a post on a sweet little iPhone application to help you find out where the sun or moon is at any given time in any geographic location. Well here’s another iPhone app that takes sun calculation to a completely new level. Unfortunately the price is a whole new level too. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 excellent [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]