Comments on: Does your listing have a great view? How about a time lapse movie to show it off?

By: Jim Dolanch

Jim Dolanch — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:27:02 +0000

This is a great tool a perspective buyer might have seen the home, but might have missed out on a spectacular view like this. I hope I can find a way to integrate this into my website.

By: Dan Achatz

Dan Achatz — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:17:13 +0000

I have bee shooting time lapse for years. I have shot tethered to s laptop and also just to the card using the Canon TC-80N3 remote control and some other cheap knockoff controllers that I bought on Ebay.

I have found over the years that shooting with a laptop introduces too many things that can go wrong. The laptop battery dies, the communications between the camera and the laptop suddenly quit (Sunspots?), I have just just had too many problems.

Last year about this time I got a job at the Tacoma dome where I had two Canon SLR’s (Rebel XTi’s) shooting 1 shot per minute each, 24 hours a day for 10 days straight. I bought AC power supplies for the Cameras and a couple of computer UPS’s (incase the main power went out at the Camera locations, and modified two Canon TC-80N3 remotes so they would have the right connector for the Xti’s.

Both cameras ran perfectly for the whole ten days. I shot full res JPEGS and changed the cards at lunch time each day. I might also mention that the two cameras were well used, as they were my main real estate camera and my back up. (It was a good excuse to upgrade to the 40D)

The stills were dropped into my Sony Vegas 8 editing software and spit out as a 1080i Quicktime file for the clients final edit. The end product was displayed at a big convention.

You can see the Tacoma Dome time lapse and other time lapse videos here. http://www.danachatz.com/seattletimelapse

By: Photography For Real Estate » How to Shoot A Time Lapse Video Of A View

Photography For Real Estate » How to Shoot A Time Lapse Video Of A View — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:12:20 +0000

[...] out David Gibbons’s example, over at geekestateblog.com, of a time lapse video of Elliott bay in Seattle, that he shot with his [...]

By: Larry Lohrman

Larry Lohrman — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:54:58 +0000

David- Thanks for the fantastic idea! I’m anxious to see if I can do this with my Canon 1Ds and it’s remoteCapture software.

By: Daniel Bates

Daniel Bates — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:16:13 +0000

What a great idea! I don’t see many agents putting this much effort into a listing (the good ones will though) and I also think that it’d be kind of weird to ask if you can setup up your laptop at their house for the day, but I’d never let an agent go if they did this to market my home. I think I will do this on a waterfront development I am selling; a 24 hour view of the longest protected coastline on the East Coast!

By: G. Dewald

G. Dewald — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:13:55 +0000

This is an awesome idea David. However, there should be one very clear notice posted about doing time-lapse:

If the sun is in your time-lapse you will run the risk of burning your camera’s sensors along the path the sun takes. Either aim your camera such that the sun is never directly in the image or use a cheaper camera that you won’t mind if it gets fried.

This might not be such a big deal for a single-day shoot. But if you do multiple time-lapses eventually you’re going to start burning the camera sensors.

Also, if you can keep the sun out of the image you’ll have less contrast issues.

You can always take a stunning sunset still image for the “sunset” shot.

Great idea!