Photography For Real Estate

I ran across this video today and I can’t help but comment on the issue of “dirty whites” in HDR processing. The shots in this video are a great illustration of the issue of “dirty whites” that real estate photographers run into. Notice how the whites and other lighter colors in most of the interior shots have areas of “dirtyness”. Kind of like there is smoke damage on the walls.

Some photographers apparently don’t see this or believe that it’s an issue that is out weighed by the increased dynamic range benefits of HDR. I find it hard to ignore.

This problem is exactly what Trey Ratcliff is talking about in his E-Book on the Top 10 Mistakes in HDR Processing. This is one of the classic problems that arise in HDR processing and Trey points out that this dirtiness can’t be remedied with sliders.  Trey suggests a couple of solutions to this problem:

1. Use the control point feature in the Nik Photoshop Plugin to touch up the whites and make them white again.
2. Use one of the unprocessed original bracket photos to make a separate Photoshop layer and blend in the original color.

Yes, this all works great if you are doing fine art and aren’t pressed for time. But if you are shooting three or four homes a day and are committed to deliver photos in 12 to 24 hours you have a problem on your hands. This problem is exactly why most real estate photographers that are shooting brackets are moving to Exposure Fusion or using multiple small speedlights instead of HDR. Most real estate photographers find that getting great results with HDR requires a huge amount of time in Photoshop to fix issues like “dirty whites” and this extensive amount of postprocessing time eventually limits the number of shoots you can do per day and means you have to spend an extensive amount of time at a computer doing post processing.

The bottom line is to take a look at either learning to use multiple speedlights or checkout Exposure Fusion with a just a few speedlights. EF and speedlights can give you a much better look with a lot less time invested than HDR processing.

Brett Clements sent me links to a couple of recent videos that his company, Propvid Queensland shot. Click on the images to view the videos. For some of you that are not familiar with Australian real estate, most real estate in Australia is auctioned and these videos are spots for an Australian real estate auction company.

I think these are great examples of what can be done with the Canon 5DMkII and Canon 7D.

Back in early July when I did a couple of posts on real estate video Scott Cooper made a comment on a post I did about a year ago on The Bare Essentials for getting Started in Real Estate Photography. Scott is getting started in real estate video and wanted me to do a post on the bare essentials for getting started with real estate video.

Shortly after Scott’s request I was watching this interview with Vincent Laforet. Vincent’s comments about getting started really resonated with me (at 2:20 in this video). He says, “Keep it simple…It’s not about the gear it’s about learning how to sequence stuff together… learning to tell a story… the timing and how the clips live together. The best way to learn this is use your iPhone to get the video and iMovie to edit sequences together.” By the way if you think that Vincent’s comment about practicing on your iPhone is a bit wacky, take a look at this video that was completely shot and EDITED on the iPhone.

Vincent also talks about watching other’s video and dissecting it trying to understand what the shooter and editor has done to create the video. I’ve experienced this. Since I started shooting and editing video I started looking at movies in a totally different way. I love to analyze the clip lengths, transitions and how the clips are put together, how the story is being told and how the effects are being done.

So here’s my list of bare essentials for getting started creating real estate video:

1. Any one of the recent cameras that shoot video: 720p or 1080p (HD) is nice but I don’t think it is essential. The 640×480 480p format are very acceptable for web usage.
2. A tripod with a head that is made for video: You want one that pans silky smooth, something like a Slik U9000 video tripod. Regular tripod like you use for your still shots are not made to pan smoothly.
3. A video editing application like iMovie on the Mac or Windows Movie Maker on Windows: Both are free. There are tons of other video editing applications but either of these will get you started out just fine. These applications combine video clips with various transitions, trim clips, add and adjust an audio track and create title frames and overlays. They also allow you to add stills and control Ken Burns panning to some extent.
4. A video hosting site: YouTube is free and easy to use but some of your clients may think it has a chintzy “Walmart look and feel” because of the huge diverse subject matter the site is known for. Here’s an earlier post where I list many of the alternatives.
5. You’ll need plenty of harddrive space: Video generates lots of large files. If you don’t already have on you may want to get an external hard drive to keep your video files on.

With these four items you can embark on starting to practice. It takes a bunch of practice to create video like the examples I featured in the last video post.

I was watching The Tech Guy podcast this afternoon and was please to find that Leo had Trey Ratcliff from StuckInCustoms.com on the show. For those of you that don’t recognize Trey’s name, Trey is one of the top practitioners and spokesmen for HDR these days. His work is very popular and he wrote the book,  A World in HDR. If you’ve not heard an interview with Trey before you can listen to the whole interview by subscribing to the Tech Guy Labs Podcast on iTunes or you can download the audio directly from the Tech Guy Labs site sometime next week.

Trey mentioned that he just recently released a new e-book on the Top 10 Mistakes in HDR Processing. God knows someone needs to write on this subject, who better to do it than Trey!

This E-book covers all the deadly sins of HDR from Halos, to Dirty Whites to radio active colors and shows you how to fix these problems.

I highly recommend this e-book! If you are using HDR for real estate photography I think studying Trey’s techniques are a great way to polish up your sensitivity to the pitfalls of HDR. Trey does great HDR but is very aware of the potential excesses and how to control them.

I think if you are into using HDR, looking at Trey’s work is valuable. While not all Trey’s work is appropriate in the real estate context, I think he has a good sense of where the HDR boundaries are.

The free downloadable Realtor Photo Guide that we give away here on the PFRE blog got some coverage on the Wall Street Journal Real Estate blogs today.

Thanks to WSJ blogger Sara Max for the coverage and for the links back to the PFRE blog. Sarah points out a recent post on the SeattleBubble.com blog that has a bunch of hilarious actual photos right off the MLS.

The photo to the right is an example I use in the Realtor photo guide as an example of an “unstaged” property that we sold in 2006 on the Eastside of Seattle. The property had some renters in it and this was the actual bedroom of one of the renters. There is actually a bed under that pile of stuff! This guys mother never taught him to clean up his room!  We didn’t stage this property.

We give away this guide for anyone to use in promoting the cause of good real estate photography. Feel free to hand it out to your potential clients or let people download it from your site. The text and photos are available to download if you’d like to rewrite or modify it. The idea is to educate everyone involved in real estate that photography is an important part of marketing.

Thanks to Rachel, a real estate photographer in Australia for passing on this link to an article by Josh F. Sanders who is a Real Estate Broker and the Founder of Shiloh Street University in Seattle, WA, an online marketing school designed specifically for Realtors and agents.

Josh says:

“…it all came down to the listing pictures they saw online.  That’s one of the essential real estate marketing tips for listings!  Give buyers a great picture and they’ll jump inside the house that day.  Give them a “do-it-yourself” picture and they’ll move onto the next home.  The listing pictures make the difference, especially when you spend a few bucks on professional real estate photography!

Even when the listing pictures were better than the actual house, guess what?  It still got the buyers inside!  That’s your goal as a listing agent; get as many showings as possible.  Professional real estate photography makes that happen!”

I point articles like this out because they offer good marketing copy for real estate photographers. Josh has some pretty good catch phrases for real estate photographers. Some photographers have links to these kind of articles on their sites.

I’ve added a link to Josh’s article to my list of important real estate photography links at my delicious account. You can always get to these links by using the link on the right side-bar called “PFRE Important Links” under Other Links.

This last week I must have talked to 15 to 20 real estate photographers about how either their website or tours aren’t visible on the iPad. I’m sure that many of you think I’ve gone “Chicken Little on you”.

So just so you know that if I’m wacky I’m not the only one, I want to pass on a quote from John Quarles who is a Birmingham, Alabama real estate agent. John is not your average real estate agent, he is an accomplished photographer and understands it’s place in online marketing. John does his own real estate video.

John says:

“I am not sure how true this is, but there is an ad on page 19 of this months Realtor Mag by smarteragent.com that claims by 2013 mobile phones will take over personal computers as the way most people access information. I was in a CE class last week and most of all the agents had ipads, iphones or blackberrys. Slideshow pro is now coming out with new scripts that are for iPads and iPhones soon. Looks like to stay competitive, real estate photographers need to start now planing on these changes. I plan on updating all my web sites as soon as slideshowpro comes out with the new scripts. I am also going to start going to HTML5 at the end of the year with video players that have fall back options so I can have my tours play on all plate forms.”

At this point in history, it doesn’t make any difference whether you think this development is good or bad or totally outrageous. It’s happening and you ignore the trend at your peril.

Some more data is a traffic chart below from Google Analytics that shows how many of you folks (about 33% agents and 67% real estate photographers are hitting the PFRE blog with iPads. Currently there is slightly more iPhones hitting the blog but they aren’t increasing at the rate iPad traffic is.

Here is a A useful link, thanks to Karl Hoelscher, if you want to see what your site or tours looks like on the  iPad.

This last week we’ve had three new post processing products that are of interest to real estate photographers announced. Since I’ve had an unusually busy week last week I’ve not had time to use any of these three products but I’m in the process of trying them out. The three products are:

HDR Expose by Unified Color
From the cursory look at this product I’ve had so far it looks interesting since it has a Lightroom plugin and the results I’ve seen so far are very realistic. Unified Color is clearly trying to compete head to head with Photomatix, which is difficult. They have a free 30 day trial and same price as Photomatix until July 31 plus both Mac and PC version.

Seems to me if you are trying to take over Photomatix domination of the market you’d want to be better than Photomatix and cost less… oh well what do I know?

Oloneo PhotoEngine
This product looks fantastic! Although, being a Mac user I’m a little put off by there not being a native Mac version. But the HDR ReLight component looks so cool I may be forced to fire up my Parallels virtual machine for Windows on my Mac. Mario Restrepo in Baja was complaining to me today that this product is so fast that he doesn’t have time to sip his coffee and watch football games during post processing like he does when he uses Photomatix and Tufuse.

Update to LR/Enfuse
Timothy Armes has released version 4.00 of his very popular LR/Enfuse plugin. This is a Lightroom Plugin interface to the open source Enfuse 4.o code.

This plugin can be used to blend multiple exposures of a scene in order to create an image with greater apparent dynamic range. Exposure blending (Exposure Fusion) is similar to HDR, but the results are most often far more natural.

Here are the highlights of this new version:

• LR/Enfuse now uses (and requires) Enfuse version 4. This is the latest version of Enfuse and offers niceties such as multi-processor support for improved performance.
• The installation procedure has been greatly simplified. Users no longer need to download and install the third party applications themselves, the plugin can do this for them.
• LR/Enfuse now supports blending of focus stacks!
• This plugin is donationware and may be downloaded from the Photographer’s Toolbox.

Trend Towards Enfuse for real estate going on
In talking to real estate photographers the last 6 months I’ve noticed that an amazing number of real estate photographers are moving from HDR to Enfuse and adding a bit of flash when shooting the Enfuse brackets. The motivation they give me is always reducing post processing time to get shots that look realistic. Many folks are telling me that they are frustrated with the time it takes in post to get HDR to look realistic. Of course this is not an issue with Exposure Fusion. I ran across a nice comparison of Exposure Fusion products on Wayne Grundy’s blog. This is the best comparison that I’ve seen.

If you’ve tried out any of these three new post processing products let us all know what you think. I hope to give you my impressions in more detail in the near future.

In the last few months I’ve talked to a number of real estate photographers who have reached a point in their business that they have become limited in the number homes they can shoot by post processing. This occurs primarily for photographers that shoot HDR and Exposure Fusion.

The reality is that once you get the marketing and customer service figured out a good real estate photographer in a large metro area can land more shoots than they can they can process. Very frequently I encounter real estate photography spouse teams where one spouse does the shooting and one does the processing. This is a natural solution to the problem of being post processing limited. But what do you do if you don’t have a spouse you can team with?

In the last six months I’ve been contacted by at least five different companies in India that are soliciting real estate photography work that they will turn around in 12 to 18 hours for $1 to $3 USD per image ( $3 for HDR and EF). I was ready to write a post today about how how real estate photographers could take advantage of these off-shore services to go beyond their post processing limit. But after thinking about it, I realized that these days with high unemployment all over why not just make use of those folks in your local area that are quite capable of being taught to do your processing exactly the way you want it. Or, looking at it another way if you are someone that likes working with Photoshop and Photomatix set yourself up a business as a real estate photography post processing business. You might be one of those folks I run into a lot that like the photo-editing part of real estate photography but can’t really get into the marketing that it takes to build up a good following of real estate agents to shoot for.

Here is what I think a real estate post processing service would look like:

1. You’d have to be good  and fast at Photoshop, Lightroom and Photomatix and EnfuseGUI.
2. You’d have to know real estate photography to the point where you know how to do all the standard real estate post processing. Converging verticals, barrel distortion, HDR, Exposure Fusion, window masking, sky replacement etc.
3. You’d have to have a way of easily collecting and distributing images. Like a FTP server, Pogo Plug, DropBox or some similar service where you could easily exchange image files with clients.
4. You’d have to be willing to do exactly what your photographer client wanted. HDR, Exposure Fusion and possibly window masking and sky replacement in exactly the way the client wanted it.
5. You’d have to be able to turn around a job fast… probably within 12 hours guaranteed. Reliability and consistency would be a major issue to your clients.
6. You’d have to be price competitive with India or provide a level of service post processors in India couldn’t provide.

What does everyone think? Are there photographers out there that would use a service like this? Are there people out there that would want to provide a service like this?

UPDATE: July 14. OK, this is obviously a popular idea! There are many folks that are interested in providing real estate photography post processing. What I’m going to do to help real estate post processors get started is that I’m going to create a list of links on the PFRE blog right hand side-bar (just above the PFRE Idol list of links) to the first 25 real estate post processors that send me their name or company name and a URL that describes their real estate photography post processing business. I’d like to see contact information, example of your work and statement of what services you provide. There are several people working on such real estate photography business pages. I’ll list the links in first come first serve order. To take advantage of this offer leave a comment with your info on this post or contact me at: larry @ lohrman dot com

Thanks for everyone’s discussion and ideas on this subject!

I’m pleased to announce a major improvement to the PFRE Blog’s camera table. I’ve decided to team with Snapsort.com to automatically generate the table on the camera page.

I used to update this table manually and as a result it was always little behind. As of today the table is generated from the snapsort.com camera database. Each category is a list of the top 7 most popular selling cameras in each category.

If you click on the link in the second column that has the name of the camera it takes you to the snapsort.com entry for that particular camera where you can get detail specifications, compare this camera to it’s competitors, find out who has the best price on this camera and look at the snapsort.com ranking of this camera. The snapsort.com ranking is a weighted score that takes into account DxO mark scores, popularity and other technical factors. I really like this objective method of ranking cameras.

As in the past if you click on the links to the retailers and end up purchasing a camera the PFRE blog gets an affiliate referral percentage of the sale price that doesn’t effect the price you pay. Since I am a big fan of Amazon as a retailer most all of the links in this table will be to Amazon. Links to other retailers will be use only when the camera isn’t available from Amazon.

Oh, yea I almost forgot to mention. Now readers outside the US will see prices in the appropriate currencies and will be directed to the online retailers closest to their location. The only problem left is that apparently Amazon does not have an Australian site so we don’t have a site to display for AU readers. What online retailers do you folks use in Australia?

Check it out, I think you will like it.

Wow, the last post on using video was hugely popular. It got the most traffic of anything I’ve talked about in several weeks. There was also a lot of great reader insights in the comments of this post. There are many more people shooting video and getting good results than just a year ago.

I can understand why this is such a hot topic, even though almost everyone has video capability in their still camera these days, getting good results with real estate video is far from easy! It’s actually VERY difficult and takes skills very different than shooting stills. You have to tell a story with text or audio, you have to get good in focus video that doesn’t shake and you have to edit the whole thing together with pleasant transitions and audio for an audience that is used to seeing 10 or more hours a week of professional top quality video.

I want to expand a bit on John Nilsson’s example and give a bunch other examples of what Realtors and real estate photographers that are doing with real estate video:

1. Ty Matthau, Louisville, KY
2. John Quarles, Birmingham, AL
3. Fred Light, Nashua, NH
4. Saint Jean Laurent, Antibes, France
5. Tony Meier, Redmond, WA
6. Allan Mackenzie, Brisbane, AU
7. Stone Home Photo, Toronto, CA
8. Charlie Dresen, Steamboat Springs, CO
9. Brett Clements, Brisbane, AU
10. Quentin Bacon, San Francisco, CA
11. Rhett and Link

The bottom line is that even though putting together a strong video is challenging, more and more photographers are learning video skills and applying it to marketing real estate and getting great results. Doing video isn’t for everyone but when done well it can be a huge benefit to marketing a home.

As a result of the recent post I did about creating YouTube videos with a mixture of video and stills and music, John Nilsson of Vail, Colorado showed me one of his recent YouTube videos that he put together. John shoots his own listings and shoots for other agents in the Vail area. You don’t see many Realtors like John who is are both accomplished brokers and accomplished photographers. I love it when I meet a broker like John that appreciates the importance of great photography and can put it to work for his clients and associates.

John uses a 5DMkII and combines the stills, video  and sound track with iMovie on the Mac. He is in the process of getting a voice-over sound track done for this. This particular version is not in HD because John was having trouble getting iMovie to upload in 720p. While 720p would be a little crisper than this 480p version this version will probably be faster loading for people that don’t have a really high bandwidth Internet connection.

I think John’s combination of video and stills with background music is a great example of what you can do to market a property with just the simple basics. Notice that much of the video is selling the neighborhood and area as much as the particular property. Also, video is used sparingly and just where there is some movement to capture.

Thanks John for letting me share your video!

I got an iPad a couple of days ago. I decided that it’s important to pay attention to the iPad as a browsing and e-book reading platform. Google analytics for the PFRE blog shows that 2% of the PFRE blog traffic is already from iPad users. Probably a more significant fact is that the traffic from iPad users doubled in the month of June. The first iPad user accessed the PFRE blog on April 3. I guest this is not surprising if Apple is selling and iPad every 3 seconds.

My primary motivation for purchasing an iPad was to see how my e-books that I distribute in PDF form look on the iPad and how PDF files are handled on the iPad in general and to decide if I need to distribute my e-books in ePub (the standard iPad e-book format) in addition to PDF format.

I have to say that so far I am generally pleased by how the iPad handles PDF files. The free iBooks app that comes with the iPad handles PDFs nicely except for the fact that hypertext links in PDFs don’t work like they do on a Mac or PC. You can easily get PDFs into the iBooks App via e-mail or by dragging the PDF into iTunes on your Mac or PC.

The native ePub format on the iPad has some nice benefits:

1. The ePub format supports Hypertext links.
2. The ePub format has a nice table of contents that you can click on a chapter name and go straight to that chapter.
3. The text flow of ePub documents is easy to read. You can change the font size and font.

I’m thinking that in the future I will move towards distributing e-books in both PDF and ePub format since the ePub format on the iPad has many nice features.

I was dismayed to see that the PFRE blog has some wacky behavior when viewed on the iPad. The little ad JPEGs along the top don’t work very well and the Woopra link doesn’t work right on the iPad. Looks like I have some work to do to get things presentable for iPad users. I think it is time to start paying attention to how sites look on the iPad. More and more of your traffic is going to be coming from these devices.

Thanks to Steve Mather for pointing out that if you are in the vicinity of Cleveland, OH any time between July 7-11 there is going to be a awesome photo-op in the form of the Tall Ships Festival.

I’ve been to these kind of festivals in Seattle but it looks like this Cleveland is big! Thirteen Tall ships invited.

Apparently this festival is part of a bigger project by the American Sailing Training Association called the Tall Ships Challenge 2010 going on through out the Great Lakes area this summer.

Thanks Steve, I would love to come!

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to realize how simple it is to see what your point-and-shoot camera at the top of your PAP pole is “seeing”.

The basic problem is that with the simple PAP rigs that I’ve described in the past (here and here) , like the polster system, is that you can remotely press the shutter but you’d really like to see what the camera is “seeing” so you can compose the shot without trial and error or guessing.

The key to remotely viewing a PAP shot is the fact that virtually all point and shoot cameras (the kind you typically use on a painters pole) come with an A/V output cable like the one connected to my Canon G9 in the adjoining photo. These A/V cables are usually a foot or so long and have a single plug that connect to the camera and two phono connectors (also called RCA connectors) for connecting to a TV. The yellow connector is the video from the camera and the black connector is the audio from the camera. If your just connect these connectors to your TV (and select the right input) you will see the same video on your TV as you see on the back of the camera.

Now to make use of this great TV connection feature on your PAP system you have to do three things:

1. Find a little miniature TV you can attach to your PAP pole. They are all over. Here’s one. Your local Radio Shack is another source of miniature TVs. Make sure the TV has external A/V input. Almost all have external input jacks.
2. Extend the cables to reach from the top of your pole to connect to your miniature TV. Here are some. Since these cables are carrying a analog signal instead of a digital signal the length is not a big deal, you can easily run these cables 25′ or 50′ without a problem. This is not the case with USB cables, they are more sensitive to being extended.
3. Figure out how to connect the miniature TV to your pole so you can watch it and compose the photo. You can use velcro or a small metal bracket, anything so your hands are free for holding the pole and pulling the shutter release cord.

That’s all there is to it. Thanks to Nik for pointing out how easy it is to connect a remote TV to your PAP rig. Note that Nik has added a miniature TV to his Polester from www.longshotcamerasystems.com but you can do the same thing with virtually any small PAP pole.