Okay, so you said earlier that, yeah, it is just a house though. Like, it's not gonna blink when you try and take a picture of it. How hard can it be? What is it like to be a real estate photographer, and how is it challenging to the artist? So there's, there are a lot of challenges in the form of, you know, like I was mentioning earlier, you don't have that creative freedom on the back end to do a bunch of fancy editing and stuff like that. So you've got to get it right, as right as possible on camera. And a lot of it, it has to do with angles and, uh, camera height, camera placement, um, composition. You have to be very, very strong in your compositions, uh, because you only have maybe eight seconds to capture somebody's attention when they're looking through those photos online. So for instance, whenever you're photographing the interior, when a, when an architect designs a home, they design the interior of the home to be viewed from a seated position. So when you go through and you shoot the home, you typically want the camera at about eye level where you're seated, so that way you can play into the psychology of the person that is looking at the photo, and you can put them in the space without them being there. You know, w- as we grow up and we get older, when we look at photos, we know what we like and we know what we don't like. And so there's so much more about real estate photography that, that lends into psychology and marketing than it does into artistic vision. That is wild. What you just said blew my head apart. Of course that's how architects design a house, but I never really thought of it that way. Right. When you shoot in a studio, you get to control your lights and your backdrops, but you don't get to do that in a house. They've got windows, and they've got lights from the kitchen and the living room. Like, how do you manage light to make sure you don't get weird shadows or weird-looking pictures? Absolutely. So there's two ways you can go about doing this. One, like I said earlier, you can do the flash and ambient technique. Um, and the flash basically creates a sanitary frame. It can help remove color casts that you're gonna get from, you know, your, your daylight-balanced light that's coming in through the windows, and the incandescent light that's coming in from the living room, and the fluorescent light that's coming in from the kitchen, and it can kind of wash all of that out and give you a sanitary frame to work with that has good colors because you know the color that you're pumping into the room. However, if you're working on the side like I'm doing where it's more run-and-gun, and you're doing a three-bracketed frame, you know, three images, and sending it off to an editor, that's where having a really good editor comes into play. Um, and, and they're able to do some tricks and techniques that even I don't understand. And so making sure that you align yourself with a good editor if that's the route that you're gonna take, if you're gonna go the HDR route. And mainly the only reason we go the HDR route versus the flash and ambient route is because it takes a little bit more time on site to do the flash and ambient. Because typically you're gonna do one to three frames of an ambient light, and then you're gonna do anywhere from one to seven flash frames. If you have multiple adjoining rooms and stuff, you have to go in and, and light those rooms. Um, but if you're working with just a three-bracket HDR, um, you can move through that space extremely quickly once you become proficient at it. And so that allows you to shoot more homes in a day. So you can go from shooting three homes a day to maybe six or seven homes a day, and you can double your revenue. Maybe it's the jet mechanic in you, but I get the vibe that you really like this because it's technical and it's difficult. Is that true? That's very, very true. I, I do have an artistic side. Um- ... I am a musician. Um, I, uh, you know, I l- I like to sing and play video games and things like that. Um, m- and I, so I, but I do feel that I'm much more technical than I am artistic. Mm-hmm. Uh, sometimes to a fault, uh, because I love doing landscape photography and things like that as well, and w- and wildlife, and, um, you know. So but yes, l- uh, real estate photography is so much more technical than it is artistic. Uh, and it's about, you know, building that system and kinda honing that technique down. Let's turn our attention to the customer. So we wanna be a real estate photographer. That means people have to hire us. Who's doing the hiring? Who are we going after? So we're going after real estate agents. Um, and by doing so, the way that I did it when I first started out was, uh, I live in the North Florida area, uh, just outside of Jacksonville. So it's the largest area, metropolis area, next to me. I'm about 30, 45 minutes south of there. So what I would do is I went and printed up a bunch of flyers that, you know, talked about me and the services that I offer, and I would drive to an area of town, and I would park in, like, a Target parking lot, and I'd pull up Google Maps, and I'd type in real estate agency, and I would plot a map to all the different real estate agencies, and I would walk in and just start handing out flyers. Hmm. And a lot of the times when you walk in, you can just, uh, talk to the receptionist, and they'll say, "Hey, the mailboxes are around the side. Go ahead and stuff the boxes, and you can go in there and put your flyers in." Um, I did that for maybe the first year or two that I was in business. Uh, but ever since then, I haven't done any advertising. I don't advertise online. I don't advertise by doing any of that stuff anymore. Everything that I do now is all word of mouth. Hmm. And what do they want? Like, they hire you. What are their baseline expectations of what a good job looks like? So their baseline expectations are consistent quality. That's, that's the name of the game because a realtor, when, when somebody's looking through Zillow or wherever, that real- r- that realtor can't talk to them. The only person that can talk to that client are the pictures and the media that you provide for that realtor. So you are that realtor's face and brand when they can't speak. So they wanna align themselves with somebody who is a consummate professional, that you're always on time, that you produce high-quality results all the time, and that you hold yourself accountable for any mistakes that you may make and, and get out there and make them right. I would imagine, as you touched on earlier, speed is part of the game. That's because they want them that quickly because the market is moving? That's correct, yep. So speed is definitely m- my, a, a very, um, a very high priority in this industry. So being able to have a, a lightning fast turnaround is going to set you apart from your peers.
