Since I’m a hopelessly addicted 360 image geek the first iPhone app I downloaded from the store was the PangeaVR 360 image viewer by Brian Greenstone of Pangea Software. The fascinating part of the app is how the image slowly floats from landscape to portrait mode as you move the phone around and how you move the pano around by dragging you finger on the face of the display.

Brian’s design is simple and elegant! All you have do to allow a group of existing panos to be displayed on the iPhone is build a few lines of xml that has links to equirectangular JPGs for panoramas that you want to display.

Just for fun, I decided to make a iPhone version of the 360 tour of my Rental home. It took about 15 minutes and the result looks like this. iPhone users that have the free PangeaVR app and type in “http://lohrman.com/7318fairway.xml” into the “enter url” area of Pangea VR to display the tour.

Yea, I know, it’s pretty geeky and not terribly practical but it’s a lot of fun. I’d really rather have Flash on the iPhone but that’s probably not going to happen any time soon.

Brad is an ex-Hollywood cameraman that worked on big Hollywood films but got home sick for Australia and went back home and started Propvid a company based in Sydney, Melborne, The Gold Coast and Brisbane.

This vid may load slower than you are used to because it’s a large HD file loading off a server in Australia but it’s worth the wait. There is a lower quality version on youtube.

This particular video has won awards for one of the best property vids done in Australia. The lady in the vid is not a model, she is Kristine Lehmann with The Professionals Bonifont Group, the listing agent for Reflection Tower Two at Coolangatta, QLD. Brad has restored my confidence in the potential of property videos.

Of the 30 attendees, 7 were Realtors and 23 were practicing or beginning real estate photographers. Mike Byron, of the John L Scott, Sammamish office told the group that, “…within a few years ago the the use of professional real estate photographers on the Eastside was rare, but currently it’s very common for Realtors on the Eastside use professional photographers if they are not capable of professional results”. Besides several Realtors from the Puget Sound area we had a Realtor from Virginia, Colorado and San Jose, CA. The video above gives a feel for the event.

Many Realtors are beginning to realize that in a market like the current one photography can make a big difference in marketing properties.

The big benefit for real estate photographers is you don’t have to carry or setup any lighting equipment and thus can work faster and get results that are very close to what you’d get using lighting. The trade off is a little more time in front of a computer processing the photos. In the example images in the slide-show above I used a tripod to shoot seven photos (a series of 3 to 5 also works) each 2 stops from the last photo and combined them with Enfuse for Lightroom.

There are a number of software products that can be used to combine the photos:

• Enfuse for Lightroom
• Photomatix
• Bracketeer
• Enfuse GUI
• xFuse for the Mac

When doing this shoot, since it was the first time I’d used HDR processing, I shot both HDR exposures and flash like I have done in the past. But I ended up using the HDR images because I liked the way they looked.

First of all I want to say that I think Photoshop Express is a really slick app that has a ton of cool features. However, I want to consider Photoshop Express specifically from the point of view of real estate photography. To do that, I’ll use the photo above, an actual photo from the NWMLS taken by a Realtor friend of mine (who will remain unnamed).

This photo has four classic things that need photo-editing:

1. The curved door frame needs to be straightened. These curved lines are called barrel distortion and is frequently present in varying degrees in photos taken with wide-angle zoom lenses.
2. Once the curve is removed the door frame lines are not vertical. We need to make the door frame parallel to the edge of the photo. Verticals that are not vertical is actually one of the biggest problems with real estate photos. I did a post back in August on this subject.
3. The interior of this little dining room has an orange color cast that needs to be removed.
4. The interior of the dining room can use some increase in brightness.

Photoshop Express can currently fix 3 and 4 but not 1 and 2. This is typical of most light-weight web based photo editors like Picasa and Picnik.

For Realtors or someone doing photo editing of real estate photos I think the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 (now available for PC and Mac) is still the best value for the money. It will fix all four problems with the photo above.

We’ve decided to bring Scott Hargis, a popular real estate photographer up from San Francisco who has developed some innovative lighting techniques for using multiple off-camera flashes to light interiors, to do one of the workshop sessions.

Ron Kenny, a Seattle real estate photographer is leading the effort to organize the workshop and as of this week we’ve started to take reservations. I think this is the first ever real estate photography workshop. Our goal is to sign-up between 20 and 30 people and just break-even. So far we have people registered from several states.

For anyone interested in real estate photography this workshop promises to be a great learning experience. Everyone is welcome.

This is the same slide show format that I use as a home tour for listings. You can easily do either a branded form or an unbranded form. One of the things I love about these tours is if you click on the little square with an arrow in the lower right hand of the navigation bar the slide show will fill your screen.

There are a number of ways to get a little higher that street level:

1. Stand on a vehicle while shooting… I have a pick-up and regularly stand in the bed or better yet on the cab to get the camera high.
2. Use PAP (Pole aerial photography). This means mounting a camera on a long mono-pod or window washer’s pole and use either the 10 sec timer or a remote shutter release. Don’t try this with a big heavy camera!
3. Helium balloon or RC helicopter. For example, Tabb Firchau of AerialPan Imaging uses a electric R/C helicopter with a Canon 5D mounted on the undercarriage to capture spectacular low altitude panoramic images.

Paul Deines, real estate photographer in Denver, CO sent me the example above of a PAP (Pole Aerial Photography) that he did recently. Paul says, “it’s really making a difference in my exterior photos. Using this technique, I can shoot over cars parked in front of properties. 9 feet of elevation makes just enough of a difference to change the regular eye level perspective of my exterior shots.” Paul is using a Nikon 8700 on a long mono-pod, a remote shutter release and a Casio monitor to get this kind of shot.

For reasons I don’t understand PAP is used much more extensively in AU and the UK real estate photography than here in the US. For example, it’s hard to find a real estate photographer that does PAP the Puget Sound area but in the UK and AU they are all over the place; almost all do it. For homes that are sited high above the street PAP can be essential to get a good shot of the front of a home. For homes sited at street level like Paul’s example above, an added 10′ of elevation vastly improves the view.

If you are a match you may be able to save Scott’s life by being a donor. Now days being a bone marrow donor is as easy and painless as giving blood. But first you need to find out if you are a “match”. To get a test kit fill out the registration form at Scott’s site. Scott thanks you for your help.

I’ve been building a real estate photographer directory as a service to my blog readers ( about 75-80% of my readers are RE photographers ) over the last year or so. The directory is currently up to just over 130 photographers and has photographers in most of the large metro areas of the US, Canada, Australia and some photographers in the EU. I require any one listed in this directory to have examples of their work on their website so potential clients can review their work. I also encourage them all to have a telephone number in their contact information.

So if you are putting a home on the market you might give a professional real estate photographer near you a call. I think that it’s marketing dollars well spent in the long run.