Photography For Real Estate

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 [...]

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 [...]

I was looking through the twilight photos over on the new Photography For Real Estate group photos on flickr and noticed the big difference that white balance setting makes in the look of a twilight image. The image above is one posted my M. James Northen. Notice the difference between the interior light color of [...]

Several discussions I’ve been having recently brought up various aspects of the fact that the front exterior photo is THE most important photo in real estate marketing. The reason is that time and time again the listing agent is required to choose a single photo that is either featured most prominently (as on web sites) [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about shooting exterior photos at twilight. Recently Cherie Irwin a RE photographer who works out of St Louis, MO was showing me some of her twilight shots and remarking how much the her client liked the photos. The shot above is my favorite of the series that Cherie [...]

After my post about Photomatrix I wanted to make sure beginning real estate photographers know that there are other, better ways to deal with the problem of shooting in a situation where the brightness range is more than you camera can handle. Ideally you want to get the darkness of the sky and still get [...]

Earlier today I was talking to a Realtor about where the line is for how much photo-editing it’s OK to do on a marketing image. I’ve done a post on this subject before over a year ago but I think it is worth re-visiting. The composite image above shows an image that I modified to [...]

Click photo to see examples I want to highlight an important tip raised recently in comments by Cherie Irwin and Scott Hargis. Last week Cherie sent me some examples of the same image shot from different heights above the floor (see Cherie’s examples above). Cherie pointed out that she’d been viewing some interior images shot [...]

I was recently looking through the images on M. James Northen’s web site after he’s made a comment on photographing upper-end properties. M. James works out of Vero Beach, Florida an shoots for premiere real estate companies, multi-million dollar builders, custom cabinet and kitchen designers and interior decorators in the southeast Florida area. I chose [...]

Real Estate Photographer Cherie Irwin‘s two comments on the previous post are worth highlighting. Cherie says says she has increased her revenue by 25% just by offering custom slide-shows on CD. I can attest to the fact that both sellers and buyers love photo CDs with a slide-show or virtual tour on it. I’ve been [...]

From Ohs Remodel Yesterday downloaded the Lightroom 1.0 trial version to use until the distribution CD I ordered gets here. I was pleased to find so many new features have been added since the last beta version. I particularly like the straighten feature that allows you to rotate an image. There’s still no way to [...]

I need to highlight a comment that Hojin Chang a Realtor in SW Orlando just made so that everyone sees the link he pointed out. Hojin points out that there is a excellent free Property Photography e-book/site on Nick Stubbs’s All Things Photography web site. This property photography site has a huge amount of information [...]

Last week I was talking to Dawn Shaffer a real estate photographer and virtual tour provider in the Vancouver, WA and Portland, OR area. Dawn is the second PFRE reader I’ve talked to that is happily using Real Tour Vision. Earlier this year Sharon Nymann, a Realtor in the Key Largo area, reported that she [...]

Over the last two years writing this blog I’ve come to believe there are some basic aesthetic guidelines that makes real estate photography effective. I see so many Realtors and even practicing real estate photographers oblivious to these fundamentals that I feel compelled to write them down. Here they are. I’ve also added an ad [...]

I got an e-mail advertisement for the home above yesterday. This realtor’s image reminded me how difficult it is to get a good front shot of some homes that sit high above street level. For those readers that don’t see the problem with this shot and understand why this home looks so weird I should [...]

Twilight exterior shots can add drama to otherwise uninteresting exteriors. They also can hide blemishes. The twilight photo above and it’s companion daylight photo below is a great example of this dual purpose of twilight images. The twilight version above is very simple visually. It shows the architecture through the lighted windows and barely lit [...]