Have you ever shot an exterior house photo and you get that lens flair spot? This is from strong light entering the lens at just the correct angle and bouncing till it hits the sensor, making circles, sheets of bright white overlay or covering the entire image and thus lowering the contrast.

There are a couple of ways to remedy this. First, use your lens hood. This is the round piece of plastic that extends past your lens, that comes with most lenses when purchased. Not always the best, for we are using a wide angle lens that tries to capture as much image as possible, then we put a blocker on it to prevent the sun coming in. Second, use your hand or a piece of cardboard over the lens to block the sun. Lastly, shoot the picture from shade, under a tree or switch the angle you are shooting from.

Time of day has a lot to do with this. It is near impossible to shoot a home with the sun just over the house. If you have the time, I recommend that you wait and shoot at another part of the day. It is worth it to get the best front shot you can.

This was not a listing of ours but I had to show. This home on Sherier Pl. NW, Washington, DC was built in 1920. I would have felt this would have gotten renovated off but there it stands, in the capitol of the United States a home that still has an outhouse. The second part of this I found interesting was that to flush the toilet, you just lifted up the seat and the jobs done.

This is another simple trick to making a room shot look better- move objects that are very close to you in the foreground­ out of the shot. A vase, flowers, or lamps, will just dominate the photo and detract from the room; the reason for this is the extreme stretch perspective of the wide angle lens. Just like the back of a spoon, the objects closest are exaggerated and the background objects are far in the distance.  Two problems occur from this. First you make a non significant object the focal point, and 2 you hide the room you want to show.

For instance take the shot below where I removed the lamp and magazines from the photo. However, for the staging of the room it needed to go back, so remember to keep two perspectives, one staging for an open house and another for the room shots.

I should have removed one of the pillows but I

Rechargeable batteries are not as inexpensive compared to regular batteries, but in a few uses they will pay for themselves many, many times and a lot greener. I myself use a battery pack called a Quantum that gives me two weeks of mass shooting un-failed with a fast recharge. It is a rechargeable pack that screws in to the bottom of my SLR camera, they also carry an over the shoulder like purse style. Both can be purchased at most camera stores or online. When you are not using them for the camera put them in toys or other devises that use them. I rarely buy regular batteries any more.

What I use
XtraPower by Promaster rechargeable batteries, I have had over 2 years
Turbo Compact by Quantum, I have had just under 2 years

This is part 2 of Shoot Horizontal When Possible, I posted 6/24/08. Now to talk about when you have to have the vertical.   When creating a fact sheet, as opposed to using a lesser photo (bathroom, hallway or detail) as one larger vertical put two vertical photos close together to make one horizontal, to keep consistent with the size of the other images. But a great shot is always a great shot and always highlight in size the best points of a home.

At our office every month we give accolades to the top sales of the month. The honor is called Maid of the Month. We do not keep a board of who has done what and how many, we just have our Tuesday meeting, the broker announces who was the top that month. Then it is my job. It is my job to come up with a fitting immortalizing poster for that individual. Every month a different concept. It started with art posters, meaning known works from renowned painters through time. Now, I am on a movie poster kick. For the past year and a half I have run through the gambit of putting our agents as stars of movie posters such as Legally Blond, Star Wars, the Sound of Music, My Fair Lady and The African Queen. See a theme here; we have a few women in our office. This month for one of the newer agents to our office that had a great career in real estate before joining us, we give the honor to the person that has 252651 some points here on Active Rain, the top of Washington, DC list, Pat Kennedy as Pippi Long stocking. Congrats.

As per my last blog, I use a Konica Minolta c6500. I love it. Very infrequently do we do offset for projects, except business cards and some local guides. I do have a few agents that do overprinting. Meaning they get a template done offset in large, 1000s of numbers to get the colors of their logo and branding nailed, then I just print over that. Offset meaning using a printing press with inks as opposed to digital, the copiers that most of us use in office. We lease ours and the pricing is great, for in-house costs- $.065 for a post card being cut 2 up from 8.5x11 on 11lbs cover, $.13 8 1/2x11 fact sheet on 100lbs cover and $.26 for 11x17 fact sheet on 100lbs cover.

The benefits of in-house digital-
1.  It is Friday, I do a shoot and the agent has written text for the fact sheet. I have the ability in an hour to create and print marketing materials for that agent for the weekend.
2. Color looks off- I can color correct on the spot and run the job.
3. For lesser runs it is more cost effective.
4. Agent needs to make a change, I can do I right away and print (price change).
5. All the work is print-on-demand and a much faster turnaround.
6. Lessen over printing.

The benefits of Offset presses-
1. Colors look more vivid- better looking photography.
2. Full bleed and unique sizing can be achieved more easily, they cut the paper.
3. Larger runs, more cost effective.
4.Unique Paper stocks.
5. Someone else owns the printer and does maintenance.

Just some thoughts to consider.

In Mount Pleasant, Washington, DC in the summer of 2004, nine call boxes were converted from their useless state of decay into pieces of art that convey the area's history in little dioramas created by sculptor Michael K. Ross in a program called "Art on Call." The boxes show time periods of when Indians inhibited the area, through the civil war to the present. The two I have chosen are "Casualties Arriving at Mount Pleasant General Hospital, May 1864", and "Mount Pleasant street, 2004."

I see many homes with the popular contacting of shelves in cabinets on homes that are being sold by older families. We have all seen flowers, plaid and stripes all in bright colors that say hello when you open a solid wood cabinet in a kitchen and  sometimes in the bathroom. But here is the best I have found yet on a shoot this morning on Cathedral Ave., In NW Washington, DC.  Need I say more?

If you like this, find more on my group and I welcome you to add your own Unique Details.

Today I am going to switch gears a bit as I wanted to pass on what I use in-house to create fact sheets, postcards and other marketing materials for my agents. I am 500,000 prints into my new Konica Minolta c6500 printer that I acquired Aril 2007, this replaced the Konica Minolta cf5001. I use the paper settings between postcard size to 11x17 up to 100lbs cover stock; I can scan at 600 dpi and it is fast. I have included the website so as to not make this a spec sheet for the printer. http://www.biz.konicaminolta.com/production/c6500/spec.html.

I wanted to give these copiers props, before this one I constantly needed repair almost every Friday, truly if not more often, calibrations and paper jams when it got humid. Now in the 500,000s, I have had nothing but normal maintenance; color stays truer and with this one came a pro calibrator, so I could do it myself. It has been worth the changeover especially for the speed upgrade; I print upward of 3000 cards monthly for some agents and have 60 agents that need fact sheets every weekend, this machine gets the job done.

In a future blog I will get into why I go digital, with Digital vs going Off-set.