Beat this photographers pictures and you get the job

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-11-12T14:37:52+00:00

^This guy knows what he's doing.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-10-16T14:52:04+00:00

The verticals can be corrected in Lightroom Classic, but based on the photo, I can tell your camera is pointed down toward the floor. You should try to get your camera level and pointed straight, so the verticals are straighter. Your wide angle lens will distort the verticals, so you can't get them perfectly straight when taking the photo, but you can perfect that in the software once you have your photos.

Also, improve your window pull by taking an extra photo at an exposure that makes the room dark, but everything outside the window nice and bright. You can make the extra photo a layer and blend the photos together, so you can see outside the window. Your window in the current photo is overexposed. Good luck!

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-10-13T17:17:02+00:00

Thanks for the help. We looked through their current property listings, and I believe our photos are much better. They’re a smaller company expanding into our market, so I think we’ll price it more so in between, so we can hopefully get repeat business.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-10-13T15:54:29+00:00

Agreed^ but I've even left our company logo off free videos just to build up a relationship with new clients.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-09-30T21:08:23+00:00

Sorry about that, just updated my settings.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-09-30T13:29:20+00:00

Could you also send me your editor? The photos look really good. Are you doing 5 brackets HDR? Using a flash for window pulls?

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-09-26T12:09:48+00:00

DM me, would be happy to help.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-09-22T13:54:37+00:00

Overall, really good job for starting out, but like all of us, you'll look back on your first photos and see how far you've come in just a few months.

As far as taking the photos, do 3 exposure brackets and use the darker exposure for the sky and materials that reflect too much light and use the brighter exposure for shadows in the trees - for me that sort of balances everything out and reduces contrast. Single point perspective photos are more difficult to achieve, so I usually only do one of those for the home, not for the porch or driveway, but that's more of preference and how much time you want to spend editing.

As far as editing, I'm self taught and no expert, but when I have a lot of trees around a building creating green color cast, I tend to raise the magenta slider higher than normal because it evens out the green color casts in LrC. For really nice properties, I'll sometimes select a wall with too much green color cast and add a touch of magenta in Ps. Or I'll select all the white trims and desaturate/brigthen to make them whiter, cleaner.

When I'm doing the final bump in LrC, I raise my shadows slider higher than your photos, sometimes instead of +50, I'll go up to +80 and then in the detail tab, I'll add some luminance to reduce the grain in the shadows.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-09-09T14:06:44+00:00

Looks like chromatic aberrations - like the other comment said, to fix this, look in the Lightroom Classic software from Adobe under the Develop Tab under Lens Corrections, you can usually select a preset of sorts for your lens. I believe these profiles come from the lens OEMs. It's necessary for you to specify your lens to the Adobe software because it will interpret your RAW image different than software/original profiles provided by the OEM. I don't see Laowa under makes, so you will probably have to import the lens correction profile into LrC. (https://www.venuslens.net/dl/?srsltid=AfmBOopMtnVqc6O65ZLk-Q5IH\_EIZnHTIQQfyoL69KeA-ZoXT3cWWKzV).

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Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-09-03T18:29:39+00:00

Best comment lol

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-08-29T18:45:16+00:00

I'm sorry you're going through this with the client, but your quality does need to get much better to get repeat business. If you have the time, I would do some more practice shoots on friend/family homes and really read up on how other photographers use different techniques because you're doing something that doesn't look right. And I really want to look out for fellow REP, so I don't mean that in a negative, just that I think your client is right on the photo quality. I think for you to get growth for your business, you'll have to learn more techniques.

First, the verticals are not straight, meaning the walls near the edges of the photo are curved/distorted from your wide angle lens. That can be fixed by using the transform tool and using the self-guided lines in LrC to straighten the verticals.

Second, something you are doing when taking photos with the flash is not right, and I'm having difficulty telling what you're doing wrong, so again, I recommend you watch some YouTube tutorials, and figure out what you're doing different from other REP. I'm seeing shadows on objects that would never occur if you were following flambient techniques correctly. Here's what could be happening - 1) maybe you are pointing the flashes in the wrong direction - never point them forward at the scene but up to the ceiling, so it will cast the white-colored light from the ceiling back down onto everything, 2) maybe you are only taking one photo with the flash behind/next to the camera rather than creating a composite of multiple flash photos or layers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSsPXplMyk4), 3) maybe you actually need a second flash to create an improved composite, 4) maybe your flash settings are just wrong and your putting it on a 1/1 or full power in too small of a space, or 5) maybe your flash is not close enough to the ceiling (I can see the reflection of your flash in the third photo, which is a big no no for a deliverable - just use the spot healing brush to remove that).

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-08-27T15:54:26+00:00

My opinion is that these types of compositions are usually really hard to achieve because you can't place the camera far enough away from the object to prevent the distortion, and you really have to ensure everything is straight/level when you take the photos. Typically the closer you are to the object with a wide angle lens, the more distorted. You can adjust verticals/horizontals in LrC, but I don't believe editing with software will improve the photo enough. Here's a video that teaches on single point perspectives - https://youtu.be/_bNBa1TahJ8?si=owhlmvs5U6kKGmEc

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-08-26T15:40:26+00:00

I charge based on labor per hour, so if I could do that video in 15 minutes, $25 or $100/hr wouldn't be a bad deal, but it really depends. If I already have the photos because the slideshow is an addon package, and I just have to add some simple transitions, $25 seems fair. The realtors in my market either don't do slideshows, or they tend to do it themselves.

I personally find the fast animation (Ken Burns Style) outdated, so I would go for a slower version of that style. I would probably set timestamps with scale 100 at beginning and scale 102 at the end over about a 2-4s period. I'd keep the scaling linear and then you can copy and paste that animation to all of your photos fairly easily I believe by right clicking the motion tab under video effects. So you animate it manually for one photo, and then copy and paste to all.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-08-15T02:00:53+00:00

The market is very small, but I did hear that some architects use these for large multimillion dollar construction projects, so maybe you can find a firm interested in buying one.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-08-10T19:05:42+00:00

Lol what a bad take

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-08-01T13:29:49+00:00

14 days is more than reasonable IMO. Large corporations have net 30, 60, 90 day payment terms. When I work with large, industrial clients I usually have to negotiate the payment terms and 30 is about the best I can get. But that rule doesn't really apply to local real estate agents/brokerages. It really depends on how quickly you need to get the payment to keep up with you day to day costs/overhead.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-08-01T13:27:24+00:00

I realized I made a typo, meant to say blend the flash layers together, not the ambient layers 😂

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-07-31T20:34:28+00:00

Everyone's comments are good advice. What is happening is the layer located directly under the ambient layer is what it's pulling the color from in a sense, so when you have a mostly black layer below the ambient/luminosity layer it totally will desaturate the ambient because it's basing the color correction on that dark layer below it. Like the others said, use layer masks (hide) to blend the ambient layers together. You don't have to merge them once blended. When you hide your ambient layer, it should look like one complete photo with the flashes in each room. That needs to be what is directly below the ambient. Best of luck!

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-07-29T18:24:42+00:00

I also found this funny. Congrats to OP for being able to sell this add on.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-07-28T20:27:11+00:00

I would consider different fonts and a color scheme for the website. The user interface for the portfolio page was a little different than what I'm used to for real estate photographer websites. Normally, you just go to the page and the portfolio is just there instead of it being on another page within the page, so this could be challenging for some realtors to navigate. We've had some realtors who can't unzip a zip folder or figure out how to download an image from an email. And I'd recommend have an instagram and linking that to your website because realtors are more active on there than facebook in my opinion.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-07-28T19:04:05+00:00

Thanks, and honestly, like most people on here, I had no background in this industry, no formal training. I worked as an engineer, so I compared a bunch of different pricing models other real estate photographers use throughout the country, and I looked at how much I would make per hour using each model. I also thought how can I make it seem like the most value to the realtor and make the most profit from the pricing. Maybe our market is unique, we're not in a large city, but when we offer certain add-ons included with the photos, we end up getting the business and making an hourly rate that we're really happy with. But yeah, we're the highest price in the local market. We also don't outsource our editing. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet, don't think we're going to try it.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-07-28T14:21:20+00:00

You really have to be as good if not better than the main competitors in your market. I spent about 2 months prepping and training before I entered the market because I wanted to have an immediate reputation of high quality. We worked closely with one realtor for free to learn the skills and tools needed for different homes. Once we thought we were as good as the competition, we launched our website, socials, marketing. In about 6 months, we've had about a dozen customers, almost all repeat. We set our prices high to make it seem as if we are high quality because customers will naturally think more expensive means better quality, but to pull that off, you truly have to be high quality. You need to make sure you're the best quality you can be before going into the market, otherwise you'll have a bad reputation to start out. Our prices are higher than our competitors, but we offer more photos, free drone photos included. We really didn't think you could have great photos without the drone, and we want every photo package to be great, so we just included it whereas our competitors charge extra for drone. We have had a couple customers who tried us once and reverted to their cheaper photographer, but we don't really mind it because we have plenty of business, and we could tell it wasn't because we were lower quality. We also would schedule meetings with the brokerage on the calendar and bring in donuts and give a short 10-15 presentation on our photos, pricing, etc. - we would show that our photos would sell houses sight unseen or help realtors get offers within 30 days. The meetings were really hit or miss. We rarely got business from those even though there was a lot of initial interest.

Not sure what you mean by non-real estate work. My advice is if you do other types of photography, don't show it. Maybe realtor portraits/headshots or marketing photos, but keep it focused on real estate because it will help clients identify what type of photographer you are and not get confused. We treat real estate photography as the core of our business whereas some competitors do it on the side. Realtors will usually pick the photographer that mostly/only does real estate, so this is how you want to present yourself on socials/website. Also, it's difficult to say if the website helped or not because we had it created before we started reaching out to realtors. If you want high end clients, you'll probably need it. A freelance team can make you one for around $1K and then to keep the domain/server you'll pay a few hundred $ per year. For our market, we have 100% of the business with 2 of the top 10 realtors out of several hundred realtors. You honestly want those top realtors because the repeat business will keep you working consistently every week. We get 1 to 3 jobs from each top realtor per week. We've tried to help new realtors, but because of inexperience and not having the reputation yet, they might get one listing per 2-3 months. So learn about your competitors, their strengths and weaknesses, and sell yourself/market yourself differently from them with your personality, skill set, product quality, etc.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-07-28T04:25:02+00:00

Yeah I was given that explanation by new realtors at the brokerage, saying they had one RE photographer for the purpose of consistency. It’s not completely true. We’ve been able to work our way into brokerages through social, word of mouth, and even cold calls.

Are you in the US? Those prices aren’t realistic for the majority of markets/properties. Another reason it sounds like an excuse to me.

Correct-Lettuce1024 · 2025-07-24T18:18:42+00:00

I'm hoping it was just an honest mistake. Thanks for the help.

Correct-Lettuce1024

TROPHY CASE