Yes, Charles, you’re right. I’m remise for not pointing out Philips site to readers before this. As a student of Cinematography Philip’s DVDs from Fstopacademy.com were one of the first things I purchased after purchasing my 5DMkII.

If you have a Canon DSLR that shoots video Philip’s site is a very useful resource to learn about all the addons to make your DSLR more effective shooting video.

Thanks Charles for your suggestion! What other video training resources do you suggest?

You can listen to the podcast by clicking above or click here to subscribe in iTunes. In this Q & A Podcast Mike and I discuss the following questions:

1. From Ted: What product do you deliver to the customer and how do you deliver it?
2. From Chris: How do I approach a shoot when shooting RAW?
3. From Alice: How do I compete with photographers that contract with brokers to shoot for the whole office? And what do I need to consider for licensing terms of my photographs?
4. From Cassie: Should I be incorporating video in to my real estate photography business?

Mike Miriello and I recorded another Q&A Podcast a few days ago. One of the questions that Mike and I talked about was the old question about how to deliver photos to your client and whether or not to deliver a physical CD.

I think there are two distinct phases of a real estate photography business:

1. Building your business and trying to increase your exposure to real estate agents.
2. You have built your business so you have a level of work you want.

While you are in the “building your business” mode there are huge benefits to delivering a CD personally to your client at their office. You see them face-to-face and you have opportunities to meet other agents in the office. The whole personal delivery thing is a huge customer service and marketing opportunity. However, once you get to the point in your business where you are shooting 2 or 3 or more properties a day there just isn’t time to be running around delivering physical CDs. So my advice is use this personal customer service delivery opportunity when you need it and it works in your life but also have a good electronic delivery mechanism. There are even benefits to doing electronic delivery and popping a CD in the snail mail.

Here are eight popular alternatives for real estate photo delivery:

1. Physical delivery of a CD: Don’t underestimate the customer service impact of personally delivering a CD into the hands of your client. Giving your client a CD with your product on it has a nice professional touch and it gives you chance to make personal contact with your client. CD delivery can also be coupled with any of the online techniques. That is, deliver photos electronically and later on a CD for the clients files. Remember, most agents are not that technically adept so having a CD with the photos on it is a big benefit (a CD is harder to loose for some people than a download link). As your business grows there’s going to be less and less time for this approach.
2. Client logon to your site then download: This approach is the most professional for online delivery because delivery is via your personal branded site. However, this means you have to have a site that has this capability and you client has another account and password to remember. One example of a template website hosting service that has a client logon feature is bigblackbag.com ($14.99/mo).
3. PFREtour.com: PFREtour.com is a tour hosting site for real estate photographers that has a delivery feature built into it. After you are finished building a tour you simply go the the dashboard and click “Share” and an e-mail message is constructed (for you to send to your agent customer) that has the URL of the tour (branded and unbranded), as well as button for the agent to click to post the tour on FaceBook or Twitter AND all the photos in the tour in a form that can be downloaded individually or all zipped together in a single file for download.
4. Box.net: This is a great site that allows photo delivery very smoothly. It has a 2 gig free version so you can try it out but the pay version has better delivery options than the free version.
5. Dropbox.com: Dropbox is designed more for online backup and online syncing between computers but it has a publicly accessible folder and a photo sharing feature that can be easily be used for photo delivery. You can send clients a download link via e-mail. The 2 Gig free version is even usable this way. The lowest level of fullservice is $9.99/mo for 50 Gig of online storage.
6. YouSendIt.com: This is a very popular delivery with real estate photographers. It has a 14 day trial. The lowest level of service is $9.99/mo. It has tracking features, security features and a return receipt feature as well as plug-ins to make it work smoothly with Photoshop, FinalCut Pro, Aperture, iPhoto, Outlook and CorelDraw.
7. Pixoasis.com: Pixoasis is a professional looking delivery service available for $11.95/month.
8. PogoPlug: See my post earlier this year on PogoPlug. The benefit of PogoPlug is that you purchase a one time piece of equipment and you get a very similar service to DropBox without a monthly charge.

Think of photo delivery as a marketing and customer service opportunity. Use delivery to keep in contact with your client and present yourself professionally. It’s an opportunity to talk to you client and make sure they got your delivery.

Update 8/30/2010: Malia in the comments below raises an important issue that may effect your decision to deliver a CD to your client. In states that collect sales tax you may be required to charge sales tax if you deliver a physical product whereas you may avoid collecting sales tax if you deliver your product (photos) electronically. Be sure you check with your local department of revenue to verify their policy in this area, it varies from state to state.

The first question is why? What’s the point of using flash when you are shooting brackets? You thought the reason you shot bracketed exposures was so you didn’t have to use flash, right. Well the fact is that when you use HDR or EF for interiors you tend to get low contrast results (more so with HDR than EF). That is, the blacks are not as black as you’d like and the whites are not as bright and crisp as you’d like. The term that comes to mind is muddy colors and dirty whites. You also have issues with white balance. It turns out that if you add a kiss of fill light from a single flash makes these problems much better. If you add a little fill flash to your brackets you don’t have to spend as much time and effort in postprocessing to get rid of the muddy colors and dirty whites.

Also, adding a touch of fill flash to bracketed shots can be done without having to “climb to the top of the learning curve” for full blown multi-off camera flash technique. There is a discussion in the PFRE HDR & Blending discussion group on this subject. I’ve been doing some experimentation with this technique so here’s my summary of how to bracket with flash:

1. Setup your bracketing as normal (on a tripod, aperture priority and exposure bracketing -2,0,+2) except add a manual off camera flash. For the shot above I used a Nikon SB-80dx triggered by a Cactus V2 Wireless flash trigger. The transmitter end of the Cactus trigger was in the hot shoe of my Canon 5D MkII with it’s trigger cord plugged into the 5D’s PC connector. The SB-80dx had a Cactus receiver connected to it.
2. Set the drive mode to single shot so that you have to release the shutter for each of the three bracket shots. This is to make sure that the flash has time to recycle between each bracket shot.
3. Use a remote shutter release so you don’t have to touch the camera body. I used the Canon TC-80N3 although you could probably get by just touching the shutter release button if you are careful and your tripod is sturdy.
4. Aim the flash either towards the ceiling, a blank wall or the joint between the ceiling and the wall so that the light from the flash creates a large, soft fill light. On my example above I had the SB-80dx sitting on the top of a media cabinet, camera right, pointing at the ceiling. The ceiling is diffusing the light out in all directions so their aren’t many shadows.
5. Adjust the power on the flash manually (some where between 1/8 and 1/1 – same power for all three bracketed shots) so that you get a good set of 3 histograms (you want the histograms high but not clipped histograms together to fill up the available histogram space. -2 will be left, 0 will be center and +2 will be right). See Dan Achatz’s description in the PFRE HDR & Blending discussion group.

To summarize: this technique adds the same constant level of fill flash with a single flash, to each of the three brackets you shot. This fill flash is improving the quality of the light so that the whites are whiter and the blacks are blacker. This same technique works similarly with either brackets used for HDR processing or brackets processed as Exposure Fusion (EF).

For those that are already shooting brackets with flash I’m sure you’ll be able to add refinements or variations to this technique.

In the comments of this previous post Neil from Missouri pointed out that you can use the My Maps feature of maps.google.com to create overlays that can be used to show property boundaries on a parcel of land for use in a land listing. Here is Neil’s example. Very cool. Agents that do land listings will love to have this feature. You could probably even put photos of various parts of the property on the map.

Today Mike Martin showed me another way to use My Maps. Mike is mapping all the listings that he’s shot in the last year or two. He’s still in the process of building the map. This is a great way to show all your shoots and the tours from each one. You could even draw the boundaries for your standard, no travel charge area.

Scott Hargis did a post on PFRE  three years ago that is a concise summary of how to approach off camera flash when shooting real estate. However this post doesn’t mention the miracle of optical triggering (frequently referred to as optical slaves). So I thought it might be useful to go over some of the basics of this subject.

Here are the triggering basics (note this works the same if you use Canon or Nikon bodies because everything is manual):

1. Flashes and camera are all in manual mode: Forget about Nikon CLS or Canon E-TTL automatic modes where the camera talks to the flashes and controls flash power etc. We are not doing that. Everything is in MANUAL.
2. Optical triggering is built into many flashes: For real estate shooting purposes the most desirable flash is the Nikon SB-80dx. See Scott’s blog for the story on why the SB-80dx is so desirable for real estate shooting. Here are some others:
   • Nikon SB-26 – This is similar to SB-80dx but has only 1 stop power settings instead of 1/3 of a stop settings.
   • Nikon SB-800, 900 – These can be set to trigger optically but these are more expensive than you need be cause they have the electronics for Nikon CLS which you don’t need for real estate.
   • Yongnuo YN460 – This is a relatively new entry to the low price manual optically triggered flash market.
   • LumoPro LP160
   • There are many other alternatives: Here is a site that has more details on other alternatives.
3. A built-in flash can be used to trigger external flashes optically: For example those little pop up flashes that can be used to trigger a bunch of SB-80dxs. The idea is that the camera body can “tell” optically triggered flashes when the shutter is open. A flash of light is a perfectly good way to do that.
4. You can mix radio triggers and optical triggered flashes: If you have a DSLR body that has no built-in flash you can use a Cactus trigger to trigger on flash which, in turn can trigger other optical flash triggers. This means you don’t have to purchase a radio trigger for each external flash you have if they can be optically triggered.
5. Canon flashes don’t have built-in optical triggers: So you’ll have to either use them on camera to trigger other flashes with optical triggers or you can use a Cactus trigger to fire them off camera.
6. There are many options for alternatives to Cactus triggers: Cactus triggers are just the cheapest alternative. You could use Pocket wizards or many other alternatives instead.

The big benefit of using flashes that have built-in optical triggers is that the triggering device doesn’t have a separate set of batteries to run down and you don’t have to purchase a triggering device for each flash. Simple and inexpensive.

Oh, by the way optical triggering outside is not as effective as it is inside.

Update 8/25: Jake in the comments makes an excellent point. When you are triggering flashes optically from the little built-in pop up flashes or from on camera flashes you have to be careful the triggering flash isn’t pre-flashing. Pre-flashing is a little flash pulse just before the main flash firing to trick people’s retinas into contracting before the main flash fires so the finished photo won’t have “red eye”. You’ll need to either turn off pre-flash (possible on some cameras) or the some flashes with optical triggering (like the SB-26) have a delay setting so they aren’t prematurely triggered by pre-flash.

As a student of video I love analyzing and studying the work the Propvid folks do.  I am continually impressed with their ingenuity.

In this most recent video they take on the challenge of promoting the small urban apartment life style which because it is not visually spectacular, is significantly more difficult than doing propvids of dazzling high rise properties the Queensland gold coast is famous for.

In 1:53 minutes they manage to distill a, charming, very personal little vignette that illustrates why people like the urban life style. Simple, well designed and effective. This is not your standard property video but this is a great example of “selling the neighborhood”.

Nice job Brett! Keep these examples coming.

This series demonstrates that the real estate photographer must always be aware of what’s going on both inside and outside when images are composed.

Thanks John you made my day!

Update Aug 24, 2010: This is a good lesson in copyright. Most of the gazillions of bad MLS photos shown on various sites are copyright violations. In this case John took down the video because of copyright violations.

With the help of  Latter & Blum, Inc (a broker site in the New Orleans- Baton Rouge area) Kris has compiled a months worth of traffic statistics for listings he has photographed compared to statistics for comparable listings in the same zip code all from the Latter & Blum site. The Latter & Blum site carries all listings in the Baton Rouge Area and gets roughly 500,000 unique visitors per month (home buyers).

The message from these stats that stands out loud and clear is that the listings that Papilios Real Estate Photography (Kris’s company) photographs get a average of 134% more traffic than comparable homes in the same Zip and a average of 145% more traffic than comparable listings in the same MLS area.

I know what some of you are going to say, “…just because the listings Kris photographs get more traffic on a broker site doesn’t mean they sell faster.” I think it does mean the listings sell faster! After 10 years of tracking traffic on our broker site, showings and sales of our own listings, more traffic on our broker site always means more showings and more showings always means a faster sale. I would go so far as to assert that if you could do this kind of study and include listing market time (the number of days a listing is on the market before selling) you would find that increased traffic on the the broker site has a high correlation to reduced market time. Unfortunately, days-on-the-market is typically not a stat that MLSs feed to broker sites so it may be a challenge to correlate professional photography directly to decreased market time.

This data is the closest thing to “proof” that great photography sells homes that I’ve seen. Anecdotal evidence and intuition strongly suggest that photography is a huge factor in marketing homes but I’ve been looking for a more scientific way to demonstrate that relationship for a long time. I think this is it!

Thanks to Kris for coming up with this technique and being willing to share it with everyone . Hopefully others will be able to do similar studies and confirm this statistical relationship between great real estate photography and faster sales.

I use both Lightroom 3 and Aperture 3 on a MacBook Pro (a 2 year old  2.53 GHz MacBook Pro with 4 Gig of RAM) Here is my impression of the pros and cons for these two applications. This comparison is by no means intended to be exhaustive. These are just some of my favorite features and issues.

Aperture Pros

1. Aperture brushes: I am totally in love with this feature. If it weren’t for the lens correction features in Lightroom I would move completely to Aperture just for this feature.
2. Aperture video editing: This is compelling feature but you get the same features on every Mac for free in iMovie.
3. Aperture GPS mapping: This is another feature I love. I can just snap a iPhone shot while shooting with my 5D  when I import the iPhone photos with the 5D photos and Aperture will automatically put  the iPhone GPS data on the 5D shots taken around the same time. Very cool!

Aperture Cons

1. Aperture feels slow to me on my MacBook Pro: It always seems to be doing stuff in the background and just doesn’t feel as snappy as Lightroom 3.
2. Slide shows: Aperture 3 will create slideshows on me.com but I just don’t find these useable for real estate use.
3. Aperture updates: Historically new versions of Aperture seem to be few an far between and Apple does not let the user community participate in betas like Adobe does. There have been many long waits for RAW conversion compatibility in Aperture’s past.

Lightroom Pros

1. The Lens correction features: for real estate photographers this is a huge time saver not to have to round trip out to another an application like PTlens or Photoshop to just  fix verticals or horizontals.
2. Lightroom feels snappy on my MacBook Pro.
3. The ability to create slide shows on any website you can access

Lightroom Cons

1. Costs $100 more: A new license cost $100 more than Aperture.
2. Interface: Lightroom 3 doesn’t feel as “Apple like” as Aperture 3 does.

In summary, my opinion is that having great lens correction features built into Lightroom 3 makes it the obvious choice for real estate photographers. This feature doesn’t make much difference to other areas of photography but having your verticals, vertical  your horizontals, horizontal and not having barrel distortion from your wide angel lens is super important in real estate photography and the time a real estate photographer saves buy having these features built into Lightroom 3 is worth the extra $100 over Aperture 3.