photography: The Winners! 2017 ActiveRain Photography Contest
- 11/05/17 08:51 AM
The 2017 ActiveRain Photography Contest is in the books, and once again, you have wowed us with a wonderful display of talent. As we said last year, there are some exceptional photographers masquerading as Realtors among us, and the response to our request for entries was wonderful - 81 members submitted 221 entries in 13 categories.
As you can imagine, judging this contest was extremely difficult, and not just because of the number of entries. Picking the best among them was hard work, and our excellent panel of judges did a great job facing this challenge.
The three of them deserve a big … (89 comments)
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photography: One Week Left! 2017 ActiveRain Photo Contest
- 10/24/17 08:47 AM
We've seen some very impressive submissions so far in the 2017 ActiveRain Photography Contest and participation has been great. But time is running out!
There's one week left to enter - still plenty of time to show off your best photos. There are lots of points and awards available in both the Real Estate and Real Life categories and some of those awards points may be easy to bag:
Some categories have no entries yet!
We're not going to tell you which ones, but you could figure that out with a bit of detective work.
Also, it appears that I may have been mistaken about … (27 comments)
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photography: 2017 ActiveRain Photography Contest
- 09/26/17 10:55 AM
We had a lot of fun with this contest last year - there were a ton of entries, a lot of amazing photos and we gave away a boatload of points. So we're going to do it again!!
Back in the day, when the printed MLS only had a simple photo of the home, photography wasn't something we spent much time on. Today, it's a huge factor in our marketing, and the simplest cameras we use, the ones in our phones, have capabilities well beyond the reach of what was accessible to amateur photographers even 10 years ago. Further, what once could … (280 comments)
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photography: Before & After Contest Deadline Extended!
- 05/27/17 08:20 AM
If grizzly bears ate your entry, you were abducted by aliens, you were preparing for your audition on The Voice, you've been binge-watching the Brady Bunch, or you had a bad case of the hiccups, you're in luck*.
The contest deadline for the Before & After photo editing contest has been extended to June 11, 2017 @ 11:59PM
*Also if the recent problems with the AR photo editor caused you to unwisely consider missing this super easy opportunity to bag 1500 points for doing almost nothing because you were bummed out and annoyed. That problem has been fixed and the photo editor is … (35 comments)
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photography: May Contest - Before & After
- 04/30/17 12:38 PM
Back in the days of film, you had to take a lot of pictures to get a few good keepers. If we could, we'd take multiple shots at different exposures and speeds, looking to come up with the best result. Editing in processing was reserved for the professionals, who had access to expensive equipment and darkrooms - the rest of us just had to burn film and hope for the best.
Digital photography changed all of that. It costs literally nothing to take more pictures, and photo editing software can change what would have been a hopeless miss into a decent, good, … (145 comments)
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photography: Upgrading Your Photography Skills
- 03/25/17 08:01 AM
I realize we're all trying to make a living here, and what we do is difficult and time-consuming, especially if we're doing it right. We never seem to have enough time to do many of the things we need to do, much less those things we'd like to do. And for a lot of us, photography falls into that category of things we'd like to do.
Whenever the subject comes up around here, comments like "I need to improve my skills", or "I'd like to take a course someday" are pretty common. Few of us have aspirations any greater than just … (53 comments)
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photography: Lightroom - A Further Look
- 03/22/17 08:26 AM
I had only had Lightroom, Adobe's excellent photo editing program, a few days when I posted about it a month ago, and even then, just fooling around trying it out, I was able to get some excellent results.
Since then, I have used it for a couple of sets of listing photos, and this week, I got to spend some serious time getting up to speed with it. As I worked through Adobe's tutorials, I went back to some photos I took on our Amazon trip a few years ago, photos I hadn't been able to do much with originally. Here are … (35 comments)
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photography: For Love or Money
- 02/22/17 08:32 AM
Since Valentine's Day was one of the themes of this month's tool challenge, I wanted to choose my topic with love in mind. Had I been writing about money tools, I would have reworked my previous posts about the benefits of blogging on AR with backlinks to an IDX Wordpress site - but I've done that already, and anyhow, love is more powerful than money.
And I have a new love when it comes to tools. I've been into photography since I entered my teens. I had a real darkroom and used to develop my own photos, and when Photoshop first came … (40 comments)
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photography: The 2016 ActiveRain Photography Contest Winners!
- 12/05/16 02:57 PM
We asked for your best photos, and WOW! The response was phenomenal - 83 members submitted 259 entries in 13 categories. But beyond simple numbers, the quality of the entries was exceptional. We suspected that the talent pool was deep and you proved us right - there are a lot of amazingly good photographers disguised as Realtors among us. Thank you all for sharing your favorite photos with us - we enjoyed them all.
And as we expected, the judging was very difficult, and our judges,
deserve a big
Thank You!!
from all of us for their Herculean efforts. You certainly didn't make … (60 comments)
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photography: Speechless Sunday - Pretty Pictures
- 11/27/16 09:39 AM
I heard somewhere that there was an ActiveRain photography contest, and that there were only a few days left to enter. I also heard that I wasn't eligible to enter it, and them's the rules, but I'm going to post some photos anyhow, just because they're pretty and I don't have anything else other than the usual boring market reports.
These are some of my favorites from our travels.
… (31 comments)
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photography: Time Is Running Out!
- 11/23/16 08:54 AM
There is only one week remaining in the ActiveRain 2016 Photography Contest, but there's still plenty of time to get your entries in. So start digging through those photo files and give our esteemed judges - Gayle Rich-Boxman, Paul Henderson and Kathy Streib - something to do. With so many categories, you can certainly find some worthy shots to enter, bag some easy points and maybe win an award.
Please remember to submit only one photo per post and only one submission per category. And, in regards to the Real Estate Category, please also note that the rules state:
"The Real Estate category … (20 comments)
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photography: A Brief Clarification - 2016 Photography Contest
- 11/05/16 03:05 AM
The contest is underway and we're getting a tremendous response and many beautiful photos as entries. A big thank you to those who have entered and we're looking forward to seeing a lot more in the coming weeks.
But we have a minor housekeeping issue:
I could have done a much better job defining the difference between the Real Estate and Real Life categories, and the judges have been having some confusion as a result.
The Real Estate category is for photographs that were used in, or intended to be used in, a real estate business context - listings, flyers, marketing and branding, etc. … (23 comments)
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photography: The ActiveRain 2016 Photography Contest
- 10/24/16 03:03 AM
Back in the day, when the printed MLS only had a simple photo of the home, photography wasn't a very big part of our business. Today, it's a huge factor in our marketing, and the simplest cameras we use, the ones in our phones, have capabilities well beyond the reach of what was accessible to amateur photographers even 10 years ago. Further, what once could only be accomplished in the darkroom, using expensive equipment and expert techniques, is now just a click or two away in a free photo editor.
As a consequence, many of us have embraced photography both for what … (327 comments)
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photography: Real Estate Photo Editing - Making Your Listing Stand Out
- 01/26/16 06:02 AM
Craig Daniels is an ActiveRain treasure. He doesn't post a ton of stuff, but when he does, it's always full of great information. His tutorials have helped many of us figure out how to do the some of the gnarly stuff - I learned pretty much everything I know about video from the excellent classes he put together with Debb Janes a couple of years ago (and if you're interested, you might want to check with him and see if those modules are still available).
This post on photo editing is extremely helpful and well worth a second time around.
If … (9 comments)
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photography: Meet Jon Paul, Realtor & Photographer
- 01/26/16 05:05 AM
Today, I had a chance to talk to Jon Paul, a Realtor with Realty World Lake Tahoe who just joined ActiveRain and is looking for ways to grow his relatively new real estate career.
What motivated me to reach out to Jon, though, had to do with his first post - My First ActiveRain Blog Post. Jon is a nature photographer, but certainly not an ordinary one. He uses large format cameras and actual film, a labor of painstaking love that results in extremely fine detail, as can be seen by the photo included in his first post. He approaches photography as … (14 comments)
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photography: The Grab Bag - Photos, Ghost Streets, Weird Twitter &...
- 01/02/16 11:28 PM
Welcome to the Grab Bag, a compendium of entertaining detritus encountered while searching for roadkill on the fringes of the information superhighway. For this first edition of 2016, we have some exceptional photography, a cool article on urban archeology, some Weird Twitter, and a completely unnecessary and tasteless visit to the zoo.
Great Photos:
Here are the winners of the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest. The Grand Prize Winner was taken just about 50 miles SE of Denver.
2015 National Geographic Photo Contest
More Great Photos:
And while we're doing photos, here's a link to the NY Times article The … (31 comments)
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photography: Creativity vs. Technology in Photography
- 01/03/15 11:50 PM
Please bear with me a bit here - it's cold this morning and this post is going to take a couple of paragraphs to warm up.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my new camera, a Canon Powershot SX50. I continue to be impressed with the capabilities of this camera – aside from the amazing 24-1200mm zoom optics, and its ability to function as a very fine point & shoot, it allows an extensive range of fine control and encourages the photographer to explore what is possible.
As I was researching the purchase of this camera, I … (71 comments)
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photography: The Grab Bag - Top 100 Photos of 2014
- 12/30/14 02:18 AM
Photograph by Karen (jumbokedama on Flickr)
This is always one of my favorite posts from TwistedSifter, an annual compilation of their best Pictures of the Day:
The Top 100 ‘Pictures of the Day’ for 2014
If you haven't subscribed to TwistedSifter yet, you might consider it - they will put something beautiful, amazing, interesting or occasionally weird in your inbox every day, very much worth a short break.
… (23 comments)
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photography: A New Toy for Christmas
- 12/26/14 11:15 PM
Santa brought me a new toy - a Canon Powershot SX50. While this camera has been on the market for a couple of years, I first saw it on our recent Amazon trip. It was the camera our expedition leader Angel was using, and I became very impressed with its capabilities.
I love photographing wildlife, a subject that isn't known for cooperative posing. I already had a great camera for that - a Nikon D40x with a 50-300mm telephoto lens, about the biggest lens a non-professional can reasonably afford, … (36 comments)
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photography: Silent Sunday - Birds of the Rainforest
- 12/06/14 11:09 PM
Our recent trip to the Amazon was fabulous for serious birders. While Mary & I aren't among that group, we were constantly delighted by the diversity of birds we saw - over 100 species were sighted. Sometimes we were very close to them and sometimes the binoculars and telephoto lenses were necessary. Every day was a constant parade of raptors, parrots, macaws and toucans, waterfowl, and our biggest category - "some random bird".
Here's a small sampling:
Next up: Monkey Business
… (20 comments)
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The 2017 ActiveRain Photography Contest is in the books, and once again, you have wowed us with a wonderful display of talent. As we said last year, there are some exceptional photographers masquerading as Realtors among us, and the response to our request for entries was wonderful - 81 members submitted 221 entries in 13 categories.
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