It’s Starting

Well things are starting to pick up.  I’ve got 3 real estate jobs scheduled and 2 more pending.  So it looks like it’s going to be a busy week.  On top of that my girlfriend and I are in the midst of looking for a new place ourselves.  It wasn’t until I started looking at all of these different houses that I realized just how bad most real estate photography is.  I understand that most realtors don’t think that quality photography is worth the extra cost.  Especially on the houses that are in the middle price range.  I have seen more images that are under exposed, not framed properly, not level or just plain bad than I thought I would ever want to see.  I really can’t believe the number shots of just a fireplace I’ve seen.  Do they really think that gives a potential buyer any idea what the house feels like?  Especially when the fireplace isn’t clean.  There also seems to be an overall aversion to putting the toilet seat down.  If I have one bit of wisdom to pass along to realtors it’s this.  Take 10 minutes and make sure that the place is clean and de-cluttered.  Hide the dirty dishes.  Put the kid’s toys away.  And make sure the toilet seat is down.  In this day and age where most people do their house hunting on line, quality pictures do more to get a potential buyer’s interest than you think.  I will admit that I’m fortunate to work with realtors who get it and shoot a lot of high end properties.  For that I am truly grateful.

As I promised a while back here are some finished images from a house in Upper Merion.  This one was not staged.  Just great decorating on the current owner’s part.

What is Reality in Portraits

Today I thought I’d talk a little about how much “tweaking” should really go into making a portrait.  For the past few days I’ve been working on images from a shoot I did last year with a wonderful young model named Sara.  She is trying to get into modeling and I’ve been helping her with some head shots for her portfolio.  Back in 2010 we did her first shoot complete with hair and make-up artist by the name of Allison Carroll.  She a fantastic job and the images turned out great.  I ended up doing very little to achieve the final images.  A little exposure adjust.  Tweaked the color temp and a little highlight and contrast play.  That was it.  The shoot I did with Sara last year (the images I posted the other day and today) we didn’t have the budget for Allie.  We decided to go for something that looked a little more natural look.  In the intervening time my Photoshop chops have gotten better and I’ve added a few more plug-ins to my collection.  Feeling a little adventurous I decided to play around a little with digital make-up on these new shots.  I also had added Portrait Pro 10 to my collection and thought I’d give it a try as well.  That brings us to the sowing of the seeds for this blog.  While working on these images I showed my girlfriend a before and after comparison of one of the images.  Her reply was “I doesn’t even look like her (Sara) now.”  This got me wondering.  Had I taken it too far?  How far is too far?   I honestly don’t think I’ve done anything too outrageous or beyond what I’ve seen other photographers do.  This is not to mention what I’ve seen touch-up artists do to images of models for commercial ads.  So I’m posting a before and after shot of the latest image from Sara.  I’d be very interested in hearing comments regarding this.