Within the photography world, as with the rest of the world, there are people driving Ferrari’s and people driving Geo Metro’s. With respect to off camera flash equipment, the Ferrari’s would be Pocket Wizards and the Geo Metro would be the Cactus Radio Triggers - also known as eBay triggers. In fact, there seem to be some different versions of the eBay triggers that all work together. For the purposes of this review, I’ll just deal with the Cactus V2s.

I purchased these in July in anticipation of doing Real Estate Photography here in Lakewood and also for whatever portrait work I might start.

My best test for these was when I was shooting the Ferringway condo we stayed in recently in Durango. The layout of the unit was such that there was an open loft over the main living room. I wanted everything there to be lit well, so I got out the Cactus remote and attached my flash. I put the whole contraption on the included stand and took it upstairs. I bounced the light off the ceiling, so it diffused a little, but you can still see that shadows were cast in the final product.

For the one transmitter and one receiver, I paid roughly $40. I should have gone ahead and ordered a second receiver at the time, and have since acquired another. I have yet to test the full range, but I am suitable impressed with what I have seen so far. If you have been thinking about getting a pair, go for it. At this price point, you can use them for a few years to get comfortable before you invest in the Pocket Wizards.

As previously mentioned, I took some time while in Durango recently and worked on my HDR images, specifically where real estate is concerned. I even followed the directions from the Photomatix people. While I actually took several HDR images on my trip, I was particularly pleased with the real estate ones.

The best one, the exterior shot above, is a combination of 4 exposures. I imported all of my images form the weekend into Lightroom, then selected them and corrected the white balance. I had shot them without resetting my settings from earlier experiments - thank god for RAW and Lightroom. I then took the 4 images and exported them using the HDRSoft Photomatix Lightroom export plugin. I then combined the images in Photomatix, adjusted the tone map until I had an image I liked, then saved it and went back to Lightroom.

I had some really bad converging verticals though, so from Lightroom I chose to edit the image in Photoshop CS3. Once in PSCS3 (say that 5 times fast), I used the Distort feature to straighten the verticals and make everything look proper. All in all, I am quite pleased with the outcome. I know there are free tools out there to generate HDR images, but none of the ones I tried came anywhere close to Photomatix in terms of resultant quality or ease of use. If you are seriously considering HDR photography, you really should invest in Photomatix.

Photo by bridgepix
I have been reading a lot lately - books, magazines, online articles and blog entries (always been a voracious reader really). I have been noticing a trend in all the materials I have been reading - composite images are ok.

When I say composite, I mean images that are created using pieces of other images. For example, there is an article(PDF) in this months AfterCapture about a well respected (and well paid) photographer who is creating wonderful compositions (the theme in the article is Halloween related).

A book I have been reading recently, Shooting & Selling Your Photographs, also has a couple of examples where the author has sold composite images for respectable sums of money.

I am sure this has purists screaming, and artists gleaming. It’s the perfect hybrid for this medium though, in my eyes. You can still deliver an image that people want. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is really what it is all about - deliver what the customer wants. And that is why the purists scream. But I am not making images just for myself, to remember something exactly as it was. And if I do, then I don’t really modify it that much.

I see a lot of potential here. I think real estate photographers have already been doing this for some time, and clearly advertising does it. So if it will help me to make more marketable images, who am I to argue. I have a Photoshop class coming up soon. I hope it will give me the skills needed to make these images look natural. Can’t wait to try it.

Last week I wrote about Photography For Real Estate entry by Larry Lohrman..  The subject of the entry was “How to Survive in a Competitive Environment. Along with the usual good advice, Larry quoted a comment from a Flickr PFRE group discussion by Fred Light (still haven’t watched his DVD yet).  A piece of the quote:

For Realtors, it’s not about ‘the art’, ‘the creativity’, ‘the process’, and you can’t base your pricing on something Realtors don’t care or know about. The only people that care about that are the photographers, OTHER photographers and those who really appreciate photography as ART.

Realtors care about PRICE. Realtors care that the photos look GOOD and look better than what THEY could take. It’s really that simple. As long as a photographer (pro or semi pro or amateur) takes BETTER photos than the Realtor could themselves, they will get hired.

Price discussions notwithstanding, Fred hit it squarely on the head.  Photographers really are the only ones who care about the artistic side of an image when it comes to real estate or portraits.  The buyer (agent/ family member) who commissions you just does so because they believe you can do a better job than they can, or than other people they know can.  It’s that simple.  So make sure you give them what they want, charge fairly for it, and you shouldn’t have any problems.

All of life should be this easy, no?

Last week in Beaver Creek I was able to take advantage of the great surroundings to do some practice photos for real estate purposes. At the same conference, I met with the manager of a new property in the mountains that is wanting some photography done. They don’t have a budget per se, but do love to trade. So I am planning on trading my photography for a couple of nights in the property during ski season. Should work out well for both of us.

The picture above, while not quite what I wanted, was generated on my laptop from 5 exposures (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2) combined in Photomatix. It is my intent to do a full on review of Photomatix in the next couple of weeks. But all in all, I am happy with the result here. I’d like to lighten it a bit of course, but it does give the feeling of the view you get from my room at the Park Hyatt. I think that the next time I do this, I might be inclined to take 9 exposures, shooting at -2, -1.5, -1, -0.5, 0, +0.5, +1, +1.5, +2 and seeing if that results in a better image. I need to go back to my notes from the HDRI book I read so long ago.

I could probably hang my shingle out for this now, but I want to get it right before I start expecting people to pay for my time.

When you are shooting a room with a great view, it is a good idea to show that view, if you can. But that is more complicated when you think about the exposure levels outside versus inside the room. Since I was in an awesome location recently (the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek, Colorado), I decided to use the property to do some practice on. I have posted a few images from this test in the Photography For Real Estate Flickr group (yes, it is a Flickr complement to Larry Lohrman’s excellent site/ blog) and have received some useful feedback from it.
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A few months ago I took some photos of a very corporate restroom, thinking (for some crazy reason) that they might make good stock photos. I put them up on iStockphoto and pretty much forgot about them. In fact , over the last several weeks, I pretty much forgot about stock photography altogether. I have been travelling for work, trying to figure out how I want to do the real estate photography thing, taking senior pictures of my daughter, taking pictures of the Lakewood High School cheerleaders, and still trying to have a family life. Yep, pretty busy, just like you.

Then I came across a blog post about fotoLibra. I checked it out. I liked what I saw. I made some uploads and then wrote about it briefly yesterday. And in that writing, I made a mistake.

I said I hadn’t made any money off of my stock photo endeavors so far. After I wrote that, I checked in at iStockphoto (haven’t done that for a very long time). Sure enough, I have had some sales. 3 to be exact, garnering me total commissions of $3.92. For the bathroom photos. That’s right - the bathroom photos. Not the pretty picture of golf carts all lined up in the morning, not the pretty cactus or the corporate biz jet. The bathrooms.

It’s kind of funny really. Some friends of mine thought I was crazy taking a photo of a bathroom, much less a few of them. But you never really know what people want (which is why I like fotoLibra), but apparently I must have at least a little bit of an eye for it. To the tune of almost $4 right now. Woohoo. I might go buy a Chai at Starbucks. That’s only enough to pay for a small though.

Hopefully this is the start of something wonderful. Hopefully fotoLibra is more successful. I really want them to succeed. But as long as my photos are selling somewhere, I guess I am happy.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft Photosynth hit the Net. A few of the blogs I follow talked about it, and it looked interesting. I had some time during my conference in Phoenix, so I made a “synth” of my room at the Westin Kierland Resort in Scottsdale, AZ. I downloaded the PDF synth guide with instructions for making a new synth, and set about shooting the room. I wound up with 78 photos.

I shot them in RAW, so I exported them from Lightroom 2 and then started the upload process. This is where my frustration started. It took over 4 hours to upload those pictures. Luckily I had other things to do, like go to the pool and then a dinner engagement, so I left to do that.

When I came back after dinner, the little green box said it was done, and that my photos were “58% synthy”. Whatever that means. I proceeded to load the synth, and was not pleased with the results. For whatever reason, I had expected this to work like other synths I had seen, that acted like a virtual walk-through. I took pictures of the room, the balcony, and the bathroom. I took “approach” photos that I thought my be what synth needed to construct the next scene in the walkthrough. It didn’t do any of this.

You are probably asking why I did all this, and expected a result other than what I achieved. Fair enough. It’s because the PDF instruction set didn’t have specific directions for how to do this. In the absence of those directions, I made an assumption. I wonder how many other people are experiencing this.

Oh well. I don’t really see an application for this anyway. You have to download software to even view these things. When you consider that Flash is on 99% of computers out there, it makes more sense to do virtual tour types of things in Flash than this thing. It’s a solution without a problem.

I am still trying to find my way around this photography thing. I am devouring books left and right, taking pictures when I feel inspired, and generally just trying to figure out what subject matter is going to be best for me.

Aside from being completely inspired by David Tejada, I have been very interested in real estate photography. As in taking pictures for real estate flyers, websites, etc. I like to think I would have a good eye for this and that I would be able to help people sell their house faster, while also making some money on the side.

The other day I came across an interesting technique for getting an aerial photo of a property. I have seen plenty of things written about using a kite, a balloon of some sort, even an r/c helicopter to get a good picture. Had never though about using an extension pole. I should have. After all, I use one to hang Christmas lights on my very tall Douglas firs. It definitely gives me adequate reach. As the article I linked to explains, the investment is actually fairly small. And whether or not you want to risk your DSLR or use a less expensive point and shoot, there are options for you. Check out the article and see what it is all about. The comments afterward are pretty helpful too. Ad watch for a pole mounted aerial from me sometime in the near future.

By the way - the photo above was taken from the roof of a building, not a pole.