A few thoughts

My goal is always to strive for improvement, while using the best I can find for an example.  And improve I have over the years.  I began shooting here in Texas in 2006 and started working for myself in 2007.  There wasn’t much in terms of real estate photography being offered here in the Hill Country part of Texas… Comal County in particular.  I did find inspiration on the web, however, and from there my quest for perfection began.  Photos that appealed to me always featured great lighting techniques and equally great editing techniques, which is not to suggest that there wasn’t a lot of creativity and solid photographic technique and talent in composing those images I so admired.  But when I started digging to find out how they were done, it was nearly always with lighting, particularly interior shots, whether homes, autos or planes.

I discovered that “white balance” was a very important aspect in the process, but not always easy to achieve in an environment I could not control very much… typically being someone’s house (if I wasn’t shooting a project for an architect or builder or interior designer).  Interior lighting usually featured incandescent lights and maybe a smattering of flourescent, complete with its awful, puke green glow in photos.  Add flash to it, and then I had a hideous white-washed area if my camera balanced for the warm interior lights.  Conversely, if I balanced for flash, then the interior lights looked intolerably yellow.  Ultimately, I came up with my own process to achieve an acceptable and natural looking balance, but that process takes professional lighting equipment and techniques… along with a good eye and solid editing skills.

Confidently capturing a homes details and authentic colors comes with an investment, however.  What I do involves more than just planting a camera at waist level and blending a few exposures.  My product is also achieved with more than one light placed on top of the camera, and that camera is not just pointed forward, producing a very unnatural and harsh look with hard shadows behind everything blasted by the flash.  Therefore, my product is the result of great equipment and technique both on site and back at the editing station.  My work is not the cheapest, and that has never been my goal nor business model.  My clients are the ones who can spot great quality and they demand it.  Anyone can fire off a bunch of exposures and butcher them together with HDR editing.  You see it all the time in real estate… the flat, almost cartoonish looking images that are so unnatural they are almost a joke.  The contrast is non-existent because they have been blended to a point that the darks are all keyed up and the highs are all suppressed, usually with some weird, dark greyish areas in between.

If you want photography you will be please with and proud of, you have come to the right place.  Take a peek at the galleries (growing since I just started this site to replace my old, out-dated one) and ask if you don’t see an example of what you were looking for.  I hope to hear form you and look forward to helping you capture the images you are looking for.

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One Comment

  1. Mr WordPress June 18, 2010 at 8:51 pm #

    Hi, this is a comment.
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