real estate blog lab

I recently wrote about the Importance of Tagging your photos in a blog post in “Photos and overlooked part of your blog traffic.”

Now I want to talk about taking better digital photos and introduce you to a great book “The Digital Photography Book”.

But first a quick look at what is being said about photography, real estate and blogging in the RE Blog community.

Athol Kay probably has one of the largest collections of bad real estate photos in existence and it is growing every day. I love looking at them, but imagine what he has at the end of the day and megabytes of storage later, lots of bad and very bad photos. Athol is also doing his best to limit the number of submissions through a series of post on taking better photos in his Photos Category. There are other post under this category as well, but all of his stuff on photos is interesting and fun. I just linked to an entire category on a blog. I’ve never done that before.

Teresa Broadman (becoming even more famous after Blogger Connect in SF) has some wonderful photos as examples on her StPaulRealEstateBlog and she give some hints in her interview with Todd Carpenter at Remex. Kris Kraft in Denver has an interesting post also encouraging sellers to have a look at what the listing agent is using for photos to market their home in The Importance of Photos. Athol would have told Kris to make that “The Importance of Good Photos”.

I ran across a book a couple of weeks ago and I really want to recommend it to anyone that wants to take better digital photographs.

I’ve been taking photos since I was 5 years old. My first camera was a brownie box camera. My latest Purchase a Nikon D40.

The arrival of monsoon here in Tucson has already spurred some great sunsets and as I write this I’m reminded to save often as we can hear the thunder rolling outside with an occasional flash of bright light from the lightening.

I know from years of experience behind the camera that no one is ever happy with the results they get. We always want our photos to be better.

Scott Kelby’s “The Digital Photography Book” will help you take better photos.

First, Scott is truly a closet comedian. He is funny in a marvelously bent way. I’m glad he didn’t constrain his sense of humor when writing this book. The book is broken down into sections and each section has one page chapters if it is fair to call them chapters. They are gems of photographic insight into how to make your digital photos better.

Scott sets the book up as if we were invited along on photo shoots as one of his buddies. He provides us tips on the various situations and how to set them up. There is no needless filler. There is no dry explanations of shutter speed, ISO, Aperture Priority etc. It is simple down to earth ways to set up and take great shots.

I got mine from Amazon.com You can also get it from Scott’s site: http://www.scottkelbybooks.com/

This is a great handbook. Quick to read, easy to implement and you will take better photos using the information Scott provides in this book.

Once you go to Scott’s site you will quickly realize this guy knows what he is talking about.

He is somewhat of a Macgyver of photography, you don’t have to have an expensive gadget or filter for everything, sometimes a shower curtain from Wal-Mart or a shower cap from your hotel room will do. Once you read the book you will know what I’m talking about.

This is another reason why I like this book, he doesn’t tell you to go out and spend thousands of dollars on expensive camera equipment to get great photos. Apply what he says to the digital camera you have and you will get better results.

I shot this just a few minutes before writing this post as the storm was approaching using a tip from Scott’s book.

There is a post on Tucson Monsoon Season which has a video montage presentation of clouds and sunsets. What I learned from Scott’s book was invaluable when taking the photos used in the montage.

If you own a digital camera you won’t regret buying this book. Oh, I should probably mention you also have to read it to get better photos, just buying it won’t do the trick.