Category Archives: Photography

High quality online media is an important aspect of real estate marketing that is often lacking from many real estate agents’ marketing plans. The majority of the industry’s use of media in online marketing consists of low quality photographs taken by the agent’s $200 consumer digital camera, or perhaps the all-too-familiar “fish bowl” experience while viewing the “virtual tour” with wavy walls and distorted room perspectives.  However, with the proliferation of low-cost, high-quality video technologies, combined with interesting new web applications that help present great … Read More »

With the plethora of gift options out there it can be tough to choose what to buy for your lovable geek. So, whether you’re seeking ideas for others or a few treats for yourself this year, the following list of top 20 gifts for real estate geeks will help point you in the right direction. To keep it simple the gift ideas are sorted by price range. Gifts Under $50 There are a ton of great gifts available for less than $50. From a 7-port … Read More »

Agents have a cool new way to present listing photos and videos to prospects. Nikon announced today they will be releasing the a new addition to their CoolPix point and shoot line up. The S1000pj adds the ability to project images onto a flat surface up to 40″. Some pretty impressive specs come packed into the small design including a 12.1 megapixel sensor, ISO 6400 sensitivity behind a 5x wide-angle zoom lens with five-way VR stabilization and the ability to add transitions and effects to … Read More »

Flickr.com is one of my favorite photo hosting sites. The SEO generated from Flickr is just one reason I use their “paid” service and membership.  Having said that, here’s a brand new feature PhotoBucket just announced that I hope Flickr will investigate and soon incorporate. Sharing pictures and videos just got a whole lot easier. Photobucket has launched a new one-click sharing to all the major social networking sites and blog sites. Now you can put your favorite video on MySpace, share that awesome picture … Read More »

In a previous post I talked about using Picnik as a way to create a custom header and background for your ActiveRain blog. This is a great use for Picnik, and really makes your blog stand out. However, there are many other uses for the site. Adding images and photos to your blog posts makes them easier to read, more appealing to the reader, and can even help to illustrate a point or give an example of something. If you’re currently using images in your … Read More »

Ok, the #1 reason Brokers hire me, is because I possess the rare ability to translate “Geek Speak” into English! #2 is, I can spend 8 hrs reading all the coolest Blogs on the Internet and decipher what cool new tool has some relevance to our industry! Well, my friends I picked up a ton of “Cool Tools” in my Monday Google Reader, the one I will talk about today is called…Animoto! (Which is Japenese for..save me money!) This FREE tool, in my opinion, allows the … Read More »

Here’s a humorous look at blogging and copyright. Swallow your coffee first and then click through to this blog post by Faye Hendry. Faye’s blog tells you repeatedly that she’s a christian but that fact only adds to the irony of the image Mike Mueller uploaded in the place of the one she stole from his blog. Mike’s revenge is also posted here in case Faye gets copyright religion. Mike recounted the story on his blog and followed up with some wise advice for professionals in a tongue-in-cheek-titled … Read More »

We have a great view from our offices in downtown Seattle. This Saturday I set up my digital camera to take a series of time lapse photographs to record a sunset before the grey clouds return for the winter. This video is the very rough result of my first experiment with time lapse photography: As you can see, I totally overdid it on the the contrast and saturation. And the video needs music or a voice-over but you get the idea. The sunset view over … Read More »

I haven’t had much time lately to keep up with my real estate tech news readings, so maybe I missed this announcement on another site. Either way, Microsoft’s absolutely incredible Photosynth technology has been released to the public for a bit over two weeks now, and already I’m starting to see some pretty cool virtual tour- like “synths” start to pop up for different property listings across the country. Check ‘em out. Here is one of the better synths I found of a listing’s interior. … Read More »

On Friday I managed to update my “old” iPhone to 2.0 software. I think iPhone apps and the iTunes app store are the most significant feature of the recent Apple iPhone upgrade circus. 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 … Read More »