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Showing off a listing with large (800×600) photos presented with a smooth, elegant Flash interface is an extremely effective. One of the easiest an most inexpensive ways of doing that is with a buildatour.com slide show. Out of hundreds of alternatives for presenting this kind of Flash slide show for a property I think buildatour slide shows are the most impressive. Primarily because of it’s use of large images that load fast. Here’s an example I used on one of my wife’s listings. I think … Read More »

What would a good real estate photography setup be if you were purchasing today? CNET currently rates the Nikon D80 and Canon EOS Rebel XT as the top DSLRs under $1,000. Both of these cameras are in the top 5 best selling DSLRs in the US. Top selling is a good data point because popularity is in fact a voting process where buyers are voting with their money. I think either of these DSLRs would be a good choice for a Realtor or someone wanting … Read More »

The real estate marketing photo above was done by Scott Hargis, a San Francisco area real estate photographer that does what looks to most like Architectural Digest level work but shoots entire homes for Realtors in 1.5 hours or less. Scott does this high quality, fast lighting by using multiple light-weight flashes (as in 4 or 5) bouncing off walls etc. to get this even lighting look. Scott’s technique is the upper-end of real estate photography lighting alternatives. Here are the range of lighting alternatives … Read More »

The slide show above (Click here or on the image above to view) is an example of the kind of tour I’m seeing more and more in upper-end marketing. This particular example is technically tour and a property site since it has it’s own URL. The important aspect of this kind of slide show tour is the image size and the fact that you don’t have to “do anything” to get the tour to display. Once you get to the site/tour it just runs itself. … Read More »

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reports that Picnik, the online photo-editing site has signed a deal with Flickr to allow Flickr users to do basic photo-editing. Picnik is amazingly fast at, sharpening, exposure adjustments, white-balance adjustments and other basic photo adjustments. It will access your photos directly from Flickr, Picasa, photobucket and facebook. Online photo-editing is still lightweight compared to desktop photo-editing but appears to be improving rapidly. Michael Arrington did a online photo-editing overview back in February 2007.

In February of 2007 Adobe released Lightroom which has turned out to be a breakthrough in Photo management and editing for photographers. Before Lightroom the photo-editing software of choice was either Photoshop or it’s little brother Photoshop Elements. Photoshop has evolved over the years as a tool for graphic designers and photographic use was an after thought. Photoshop Elements is better but not much. About 5 years ago a Realtor friend asked me what software he should use to edit his real estate photos. Without … Read More »

These days photo manipulation is making the news all the time. Photo manipulation with Photoshop and other photo editors has become such an issue that Adobe and Cannon have teamed up to create a suite of tools that would allow a photo to be matched with the camera that shot it and detect if the photo has been manipulated. As you would expect, this issue arises in real estate photography. In my last post here at Geekestate I pointed out that photo-editing is one of … Read More »

One of the most important factors in creating great property photos is post processing (photo-editing) the images after they come out of the camera. The image above is by Aaron Leitz who is a professional real estate and architectural photographer that works in the Seattle area. Aaron’s is an example of someone who pays careful attention to making sure each of his images looks it’s best buy using post processing. His image above illustrates what a good marketing image can look like. It grabs and … Read More »

While browsing through the listings in our office earlier this year I noticed that out of 60 listings that our office had at the time only the listings my wife and I had have virtual tours. This was surprising. So I decided to do some more research in the general area we do most of our business. Here’s what I found: Over all only 8% of the listings had virtual tours that agents had to pay for. In the $300,000 to $600,000 price range 7.5% … Read More »

The most important photo of a home is the front exterior. 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) or the only photo (as in print media ads where there are only space for one photo). In these cases this single has the job of creating enough excitement to get the prospective buyer to click a link for more information or make the call to … Read More »