Enhance Your Internet Viewing Experience: Calibrate your Computer Monitor

The management of color for digital photography is an extremely complex subject, of which most amateur photographers have little or no understanding. Basically, color management has to do with the whole process of color digital photography, including how photos are processed and viewed. For most amateur photographers, a thorough understanding and application of this process is not practical. However, there is one part of the process that could be practical for non-professionals and would greatly serve the medium of digital photography: calibration of computer monitors. 

The brightness and color rendition of computer monitors changes over time, and the stock monitor brightness and color/contrast monitor settings are generally not ideal for viewing photographic images. Furthermore, the ambient lighting conditions under which a monitor is viewed will have an effect on the viewer's perception of the image (applies to viewing printed images as well). Conscientious professional photographers will calibrate their computer monitors with special software and hardware that enables them to achieve a more consistent and accurate view of photos on their monitors. This specialized software and hardware is not necessarily terribly expensive (although more elaborate and versatile versions can be), nor is it difficult to use for someone who is at least moderately comfortable with installing and using various kinds of computer software.  Here are a couple of examples of monitor calibration tools that are reasonably accessible for the average computer user: Colormunki and Pantone Huey.  Both of these products can be had for under $200.

Ideally, for best viewing of images, the monitor calibration should take into account the nature of the ambient room light. However, even calibrating a monitor without regard to the ambient room lighting can make for a much more accurate photo viewing experience than simply using the stock monitor settings, or, even worse, badly manipulated monitor settings.

Some professional photographers will occasionally go to the extent of calibrating their clients' monitors. However, this is not practical in all cases. Furthermore, serious photographers are interested in disseminating their work to the widest possible audience, in a manner that represents their work as accurately as possible. Since the Internet has now become the preeminent medium for viewing photographs, it makes sense to try to ensure that the photo viewing medium enables viewers to have the best possible viewing experience.

Architectural Exterior Twilight Photo

Here is a recent twilight photo of a beautiful villa-style home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Double Page Ad in the December, 2011 Issue of Gentry Magazine

One of the photos I shot for a recent real estate listing was used in a double page ad in  the December, 2011 issue of Gentry Magazine. You can see it in the DigiMag version here.

The ad design was by Marketing Designs.

Joseph Eichler, Architect?

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and people often asked if I am related to "the" Eichler, the...um...architect. They mean the founder of Eichler Homes, Joseph Eichler, who was my grandfather. He was not an architect but a developer; however, he was very much interested in architecture and modern design, and he worked with some very talented architects (among them Quincy Jones, of the firm Jones and Emmons) to achieve the unique Mid-Century Modern style for which he became well known. You can find out more about him here: Joseph Eichler

Architectural Photography-Expanded Commercial/Institutional Portfolio on My Website

I just added 8 photos to the commercial/institutional portfolio on my website: www.eichlerphoto.com

Here is a sample.

Moore's Law Strikes Again-The Evolution of the Microchip

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, next year Intel will begin distribution of microchips that use what it calls a Tri-Gate transistor. Instead of electrons flowing along a flat channel, as occurs in current transistors, they flow along three sides of a raised fin with the new design. Reportedly, the new transistors will perform about 37% better and use about half the power. Here is an article in PC Magazine that goes into more detail: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384909,00.asp

What it is all about-Why High Quality Photos Matter for Real Estate Listings

A quote from a homeowner whose house I photographed for a real estate listing: "There is no doubt that your stunning photographs of our mother's home at 728 Gailen Ave, Palo Alto, added 10s of thousands of dollars to the sale price of this home.  We are signing papers today and should fund by the end of next week."  Not only did the photos help the home sell faster and for more money than it otherwise would have done, a direct benefit to both the seller and the listing agent, the photos can also help the listing agent to gain more business. I can't say this enough: quality real estate photographs are not just about the immediate listing; they are also about helping listing agents to enhance their profiles in the marketplace.

A Day at the Beach in Castroville

Here are some photos from a recent shoot of a townhouse located in Monterey Dunes Colony, in Castroville, California. The clients were Alan Dunckel and Derk Brill, Alain Pinel Realtors, Palo Alto. Wish I had more time to hang around and enjoy the beach, but I had to get my work done.

Recent Work-Living Room

Here is a shot from a real estate listing (276 Loucks Ave. in Los Altos) that I shot recently for Julie Tsai-Law, Alain Pinel/Palo Alto. The staging is by Karen Salveson, of Miss Conception Design. The paintings are by Chris Ehlers.

I used a fairly substantial amount of supplementary lighting here, and each room had at least two lights in it.

Updated Eichler Kitchen in Greenmeadow

A shot of a kitchen in an Eichler Home in the Greenmeadow section of Palo Alto.

Go With a Trackball for Digital Photo Editing

After working with a mouse for a long time for my photo editing, I started to develop some strain in my little finger. I was using that finger to help stabilize the movements. This year I switched to a Logitech trackball and it seems to be working out much better. Here is what I use: http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/trackballs/devices/wireless-trackball-m570.  You can develop hand strain with a trackball too if you overdo it, but I think this trackball is better than a mouse for photo editing. I also frequently make use of a Wacom tablet/stylus (similar to this: http://www.Wacom.com/en/Products/Intuos/Intuos4Medium.aspx), which has the additional benefit of lessening hand strain by using the hand in a different way from a trackball or mouse.

The Apple-Eichler Connection: Eichler Homes Were a Primary Inspiration for Steve Jobs

I was just listening to an interview with Charlie Rose and Walter Isaacson, the author of the recently released biography of Steve Jobs, in which Isaacson mentions that Jobs lived in an Eichler home in Silicon Valley when he was young and was strongly influenced by the experience. In fact, Jobs reportedly cited Eichler Homes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Eichler) as a direct inspiration and described their design as a "first vision for Apple." Furthermore,  Apple's co-founder, Steve Wozniak, also lived in an Eichler Home when he was young. What a connection: Eichler Homes as an inspiration for one of the most important companies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

For anyone who is not familiar with Eichler Homes, here are some books about the company and the homes: http://www.amazon.com/Eichler-Homes-Design-Jerry-Ditto/dp/0811808467 and http://www.amazon.com/Eichler-Homes-Design-Jerry-Ditto/dp/0811808467. Also, this may be of interest:  http://www.amazon.com/Quincy-Jones-Cory-Buckner/dp/0714848433/ref=pd_sim_b_8.  Quincy Jones was one of the architects who did designs for Eichler Homes.

Rancho del Eliseo-a Very Unique Residence in Bonny Doon

I recently had the opportunity to shoot a very unusual real estate listing: a lovely house located in the mountains near Santa Cruz, CA. The house is situated in the middle of approximately 150 acres, about half forest and half ranch land. In addition to the house, there were llamas and barns, 2 guest houses, and a small lumber mill, as well as hiking trails through the forest. I shot the property over 4.5 days. One of the challenges of this shoot was fog, which is common on the California coast from around Santa Barbara on up. While the fog tends to recede out to sea during the middle of the day, it can remain within view out over the ocean, and even over the shoreline, throughout the day. For this property, views of the shoreline and the ocean were essential, and the fog can be unpredictable, which necessitated more trips to the property than might otherwise have been necessary. I was never able to get a completely fog-free view when the light was right for a westward looking shot, but fortunately the property owner had a nice shot which met this criteria (taken from the ranch portion of the property above the house, showing open fields and grazing llamas, with the ocean in the background). Also, the fog provided some nice atmospheric views as it rolled in or receded. Here is the website for the listing: www.ranchodeleliseo.com. Wouldn't it be nice if all shoots could be like this? I wish I had more time to enjoy just being there, but I was shooting pretty constantly. My clients wanted a large number of shots to cover the breadth of the property's features, as well as to convey the ambiance of the location, which included showing the nearby beach.

The listing is a group effort of the Zane MacGregor brokerage in Palo Alto, CA.

Menlo Park Twilight

250 Gloria Circle, Menlo Park, CA. Listed by Ken DeLeon, Keller Williams-Palo Alto.

This image was used as the lead photo in the ads.

More and more real estate agents are discovering what architects and lighting designers have known for a long time: twilight images can really make a building stand out, even with low budget printing.  And agents are requesting these kinds of shots more frequently, and not only for their higher-end listings, but for solidly mainstream ones as well.

Technical note: the lighting inside the garage was primarily fluorescent, which looks green to the camera when using a daylight color balance setting; therefore, I selectively balance the color in the garage windows to match the tungsten lighting inside the rest of the house.

Ranch at Sunset

From a recent shoot of a home located on a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was clouding up and I had packed up, thinking I was done for the day. Then I saw this out the window, so I had to shoot it. The client loved it.

Twilights-Continued

Another in my ongoing series of twilight shots on this blog.

I shot this on a very dreary, rainy day. The sky was especially bad, and didn't take on much of that blue twilight look that you can generally get even on overcast days, so I replaced the sky with a better one. As with a number of the previous twilight examples, some of the windows were dimmer that others, so some selective retouching was needed to balance these out better. For really extreme differences, or when there is no light at all in some windows, it is best to add some light to the inside.

I shot this Palo Alto, CA, home for a real estate listing for Steve Pierce and Adam Touni of Zane MacGregor Real Estate.

New Website

I just changed the format of my website and made some changes to the portfolios. Please have a look: www.eichlerphoto.com

Please Buy My House

A photo from the recent shoot for a real estate listing of a luxury home set on a ranch, on the California Coast. This won't be used for the marketing, but I thought it was kind of fun. Llamas have such amusing expressions.

Tooting my Own Horn

This from a new client about a recent job I did for him: "[your] photos are the best I have seen in years. If you are on linkedin, I would be happy to recommend you."  The job was to shoot a nice condo in Russian Hill in San Francisco, for a real estate listing, and the seller was very particular about the look of the photos. In fact, she insisted that the agent use me for the job.

Music to my ears.

Woodside Twilight in Black and White

I really enjoy doing black and white photos, but I don't have many opportunities to do black white for commercial jobs. I shot this for a real estate listing by Scott Dancer, Coldwell Banker, Woodside, CA, and I delivered it to the client in color.

Many architects and architectural photographers feel that black and white can help to emphasize the design of the structure. One of my favorite architectural photographers, Ezra Stoller, shot mostly in black and white. And the mostly widely known architectural photo, by Julius Shulman, of Richard Neutra's Kaufmann house, is in black and white.

Recent Eichler Home Listing

Here is a rear exterior shot of a nicely updated Eichler Home in the Greenmeadow area of Palo Alto, which was on the market recently.

Fujifilm Introduces a New Compact Digital Camera

Fujifilm has recently added the Finepix X100 to its line, and I am very interested in this camera: http://www.finepix-x100.com/ All the reviews I have seen indicate that it is a very well made and high-performing camera, primarily oriented toward professionals and advanced amateurs who want a camera that is very compact and flexible and who do not need interchangeable lenses.  The camera has a 35mm equivalent (full frame) focal-length lens, which serves very well as a normal-to-slightly-wideangle focal length. This camera seems ideally suited for candid "street" photography. The only cons I have read about are that the user interface and some of the ergonomics could be a bit better, but the user interface could potentially be dealt with in a firmware update.  Here is a review of the camera on the Luminous Landscape website: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/fujifilm_x100_test_report.shtml

I plan to get one of these cameras within the next year, unless something even better comes out by then.

Recent Work

Here are photos from a recent real estate listing shoot for 700 Benvenue Avenue, Los Altos, CA, for Ken DeLeon, Keller Williams, Palo Alto, who, by the way, is on track to be the number one real estate agent in the US this year, in terms of dollar volume.

This was a fun one because it was very well staged and I got to do some nice twilight shots. Have I mentioned how much I like to do twilights?

And here is a double page ad for the listing in the Palo Alto Weekly.

Michael Freeman Revisits HDR

Michael Freeman, the author of Mastering High Dynamic Range Photography, takes another look at the HDR technique in this blog article: http://thefreemanview.com/techniques/hdr-revisited/

Mastering the Art of High Dynamic Range Photography has become one of the foremost reference books on this technique. However, Mr. Freeman had stopped using the technique several years ago, in favor of another multiple exposure technique, known as exposure fusion, with which he feels it is easier to achieve natural looking results than with the HDR/tonemapping process.

Mr. Freeman's article has some useful illustrations, and it reflects his disappointment with the multitude of poorly executed HDR images that one finds now all over the Web. Recently, I have been noticing quite a bit of poorly done HDR in low-budget marketing materials.

Adobe Lightroom's JPEG Compression Settings

Here is an interesting Web article regarding Adobe Lightroom's jpeg compression settings: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality

The article includes useful comparisons of the effect of different jpeg compression settings with different kinds of photos. One conclusion of the article is that one size does not fit all with regard to these settings. With the same setting, different photos can exhibit very different amounts of jpeg compression artifacts.

More Twilights

I love doing twilight shots. However, it is not often that conditions are ideal for these, in which case extra Photoshop work is required. The idea is to wait until the interior and exterior light is perfectly balanced.  However, often the interior lighting is very uneven, and elaborate supplemental interior lighting for these shots is often not in the budget for real estate photography. In addition, even when the sky is blue in real life, with the best overall balance, the sky may appear dull and greyish in a photo, so enhancement or replacement of the sky with Photoshop is required. For both of these photos, I replaced the sky. In the top photo, I also added a little supplementary lighting to the upstairs. In the bottom photo, the upper windows were not lit because I didn't have access to the attic, so I had to manufacture some light with Photoshop. With  both photos, I had to do some selective modification to the color and brightness of individual windows to balance them out, in addition to a variety of other retouching. It is partly because of this extra processing work that I charge more for these kinds of photos.

Twilight Photos

Twilight photos can be a great way to show off a building, especially if the purpose of the photo is for marketing.  The dramatic effects that can be achieved can really make a property stand out in print or on the Web.

The best time for these photos is shortly after sunset, and the best lighting may only last a few minutes. The best timing will vary with the weather, the time of year, the orientation of the property, the intensity and character of the building's built in lighting, the color of the building's exterior (especially how light or dark it is), the photographer's own concept for the photo, and perhaps the intended end usage of the photo.  

For architectural photography, which generally demands the highest quality, often only one photo will be created per twilight shooting session.  For real estate photography, which is generally less demanding, and where ultimate quality may be less important than cost and quantity, more photos may be needed to fill out a brochure or website.  In the latter case, one killer shot may be sacrificed for a number of pretty good shots. 

Twilight photography can also be effective for interiors, and sometimes good lighting for the interiors will occur earlier than that for an exterior shot, making it easier to obtain several excellent shots in the same shooting session, although this can require careful planning and execution, and perhaps an assistant to help move equipment quickly for the next shot.  The bigger the property, the more difficult this becomes.

Below are a couple of examples of twilight shots.

Suggestions for Presenting a Home for Sale

Barbara Corcoran, founder of the real estate brokerage The Corcoran Group, has some useful suggestions for preparing your home for sale.  See this YouTube video: Corcoran-home preparation

In some situations, vacating the home and having it professionally staged can be worth the cost and inconvenience, in terms of helping the home to sell faster and for more money. People tend to think of staging only for higher priced homes, but it can be useful for midrange homes as well.

Here are some other things I might add to Ms. Corcoran's suggestions:

• In addition to basic vacuuming of the house, I would suggest cleaning the windows and minimizing clutter absolutely everywhere you can. 

• Don't leave garden hoses strewn about the yard, and leave out only those hoses that are absolutely necessary.

• Replace any burnt out light bulbs and make sure that the bulbs in matching fixtures are all of the same type and wattage.

• Remove or replace (with more decorative ones) any floor mats in the kitchen and bathrooms.

If the home must be shown with your own furnishings (as opposed to completely replacing them with staging furnishings), it might still be useful to hire a professional stager to determine how to create the best presentation with your own furnishings, and perhaps to add a few, inexpensive, decorative touches here and there.

Adobe Lightroom/Camera Raw Processing Technique

There is an excellent and very informative discussion going on over in the Luminous Landscape Lightroom forum, which addresses some fundamental digital processing techniques concerning the setting of white and black clipping. This also applies to Adobe Camera Raw.

 Here is a link to the discussion: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=50915.0

The Oriental Warehouse, San Francisco

Several months ago I had the opportunity to shoot some photos for a real estate listing at the Oriental Warehouse, in the south of Market Street section of San Francisco, at 650 Delancey Street. It is a 19th Century brick warehouse that has been converted into live/work lofts.  I love shooting this kind of the thing.  Here is a shot of the lobby.

The Current State of Real Estate Photography

An amusing and informative article regarding the use of photography to present real estate listings: http://www.inman.com/buyers-sellers/columnists/teresa-boardman/take-better-listing-photos-or-dont-take-them-all

I like Fred Light's comment on this blog post: " 'Web Appeal' is the 'Curb Appeal' of ten years ago.
Period."

Ezra Stoller and Modern Architecture

Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman were arguably the most influential and successful (in terms of the quality of their work and the significance of their commissions, not necessarily monetarily) architectural photographers of the 20th Century. Between them, they photographed the work of all of the top modern architects, including Wright, Neutra, van der Rohe, Johnson, Pei, Saarinen, etc..  Not long ago I found a copy of Ezra Stoller's book Modern Architecture, which was last reprinted in 1999. I had been meaning to get this book for many years.  Now I regret that it took me so long to get it. 

Shulman's work tends to get more recognition than Stoller's, perhaps because there are more books devoted to Shulman's work, some of which are still in print; and perhaps also because Schulman produced several iconic images (such as his famous photo of Richard Neutra's Kaufman house), that have received very broad exposure in publications beyond those devoted to architecture.  However, I think Stoller's work is of equal quality, and I think I even prefer it  to that of Shulman.

In any case, I think that anyone interested in architecture and architectural photography should take a good look at Stoller's work in this book.  Of course one can find examples of his work in many books on modern architecture, but I think it is especially useful to view his body of work in one place.

Are Your Single-Property Websites/Virtual Tours Viewable on an iPhone/iPad?

The popularity of the Apple iPhone and iPad continues to grow, and the iPad has really upped the game for mobile devices. Its relatively large screen makes it comfortable for reading, and it is an impressive medium for viewing images. However, these Apple mobile devices are not compatible with Adobe's Flash technology, which is what many single-property websites (aka virtual tours) are based on for their slideshows and special effects. 

While some have criticized Apple for not including Flash compatibility for its mobile devices, the fact is that Apple is highly unlikely to change its mind about this, and it is highly unlikely that this will have an adverse effect on Apple's sales of the iPhone and iPad.

Apple's market share for mobile devices continues to grow, and I would be willing to bet that its market share for these devices is especially high in the Bay Area.  More and more people are using their mobile devices for web browsing, and I believe that this is a marketing avenue that those involved  in real estate marketing should not ignore.

While my main photography website is based on Flash technology, it also offers an alternative (html mirror) site that is viewable on an iPhone or iPad. Also, I now offer non-Flash (html) single-property websites to my real estate clients, which have the additional benefit of looking very much like they do on a normal computer monitor.

The iPad in particular is a great presentation tool. Realtors, imagine using it in a listing presentation to show prospective clients how you would present their home on the Web.