It seems more and more real estate professionals are finding out what photographers have known for some time: Homes look better in the evening.

The sky turns all sorts of great colors for great exterior images (probably the one time of day when a little extra pollution is actually helpful!), and the outside light levels more closely match the light levels inside the home for easy, dramatic interior shots. I love taking pictures of real estate in the evening.

When is the best time to shoot? I have found that if you hang around for the hour after sunset (known as "civil twilight") you are bound to get some great images. Be patient and just keep snapping away. You'll eventually find that "sweet spot" that is the last 15 minutes before the sky turns really dark. If your camera is set for the color cast of the tungsten lights inside a home, it makes the sky a beautiful, unreal shade of blue! This is especially useful if it's a cloudy evening: the cloud cover will look blue or purple instead of gray.

* I have the US Naval Observatory's Sun and Moon Data page bookmarked so I can easily look up sunset and sunrise times.

Good news Shutterbugs! Adobe's new image organizing/cataloging/editing program, Lightroom is now available for pre-order and will ship in mid-February. I have been using Lightroom in its public beta form for some time now and LOVE it. When I get home from a shoot, I load all of the images from my camera on to my computer and immediately in to Lightroom. I can quickly and easily categorize, keyword and arrange the shots I like best and then do very advanced corrections on them. The only things I use Photoshop for nowadays is to correct for lens and perspective distortion, put in fake blue skies, remove garbage cans from the yard etc.

What really excites me about Lightroom is the way that it is organized in to "modules" that operate almost as separate, yet linked, programs. Currently there are 5 modules in Lightroom: LIbrary (for organizing), Develop (for photo corrections), Slideshow (make cool slideshows in seconds), Print (very powerful print layout and options), and Web (make your own customized web galleries). Like Photoshop and all its Plugins, Adobe is releasing a developer's kit that will allow third parties to create their own "modules" that will work seamlessly within Lightroom.

Lightroom is super easy to work with. Adobe let anyone download the beta version and set up forums where users could post their input. Adobe listened too. Lightroom has changed dramatically since its first public beta release. Lightroom was built from the ground-up with photographers in mind. 

From a real estate perspective: I can see the "Slideshow" and "Web" modules as having quite a few uses...One could break free of the oppressive chains of the MLS and create their own photogalleries to showcase their properties the way they want on their website. You could quickly organize your best photos in to a high resolution, full screen slideshow with music and effects to show at listing appointments.

The best part: Lightroom only costs $199 if you buy it before February 30th, 2007.

The free beta version doesn't expire till Feb 28th so it is worth downloading and checking out. Lightroom is the perfect compliment to Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. 

Apologies to the Stagers Group if this is not appropriate. Feel free to delete...

Because we all remember the days of film and have most likely used film cameras, when taking photographs we tend to point our camera at a scene, press the shutter button once, and move on to the next scene. The "culture of film" is deeply ingrained in our creative psyche. Lately, I have been referring to taking photos as "capturing images" which I feel more accurately reflects the practice of photography in the digital age. My recent purchase of PTgui, an amazing stitching program has encouraged me to think about digital photography in a whole new way...

I captured the above image of this "weird, retro-looking white building" a few months ago with a 6mp digital camera (Nikon D50) and a cheap telephoto lens on a tripod. It is actually 12 separate images stitched together and the original, uncropped image is about 5,400 pixels wide and 5,600 pixels tall. That's a 31 megapixel photo! I have spared you the time it would take to download the original but here is a 100% crop from a small section of the image:

My telephoto lens sucks and the wind was blowing but you can see the people inside the Space Needle! Pretty neat, to say the least.

I think the creative real estate or staging professional could find many uses for a stitching program like PTgui. Obviously, getting a wider view of rooms is a start. You could use the above technique to get hyper-detailed exterior and interior shots as well. Use your 5 mp camera to create huge, detailed poster prints. It is an amazingly powerful, versatile, yet simple program to use. Take a look at their great gallery page.

PTgui costs about $80.00 but you can download a trial version for free. The only catch with the trial version is that every image you create will have a visible watermark, and you can't save your stitching project.  

While thinking about responding to Lee Jinks' post on What would be the best first digital camera for a new agent I prioritized what I thought to be the essential needs of an interior photographer. For me, the essentials are (in order of necessity) -

digital camera (obviously) and wide angle lens. These are the big two that I would need to function. Next on the list are tripod (almost listed as an essential), image retouching software (like Photoshop) and a flash. Yup, a flash is absolutely at the bottom of my list (topic for another post?).  

A wide angle lens is an essential piece of equipment. I'm no expert on digital point-and-shoot cameras, but as far as I'm concerned, none of them are capable of taking a wide angle picture...in a single shot. Aha! There's the caveat. Almost all digital point-and-shoot cameras come with stitching software. Usually people stitch together 4 or 5 images to make a long, highly distorted panorama. But an intrepid real estate agent with a little extra time could easily stitch together just 2 photos and get a fairly undistorted wide angle shot from their 24mm point-and-shoot... 

Here's an image from a shoot for an agent the other day who wanted things "bright and wide!" "OK," I said. This shot is actually 3 frames stitched together but there was so much overlap it probably could have been done with just 2 frames. It covers about a 180 degree field of view. We didn't end up using the shot for the listing, but it's a good example of what a digital camera and stitching software is capable of.

The next time you are shooting a listing, set aside a few minutes at the end and experiment with taking some "2 shot panoramas." You may not need to search high and low for that "perfect" digital camera after all. 

**Post your best 2-shot panoramas here!