My first Real Estate Media gig is done - my thoughts.
One of my favorite farrier clients hooked me up with my first gig in real estate media. This was an amazing opportunity to work with realtor Bill Kraatz who specializes in horse farms. Mr. Kraatz gave me this opportunity knowing that this is my first shoot. I think we both hope that this turns out to be a long and fruitful relationship.
My first shoot was a nearly million dollar farm in Lexington, KY.
Just one day earlier, Mr. Kraatz called me and we scheduled a shoot for noon. That evening before the shoot, I checked all my equipment (batteries, cards, lenses), which are always ready for action. The morning of the shoot, after I finished a few trims on some horses in Cincinnati, I headed south to Lexington and got to the farm right on time.
Miniature effect applied to the lead picture of the farm.
I was a bit nervous as I got close to the farm and knew it was nearly show time, but once I arrived and introduced myself I got right to work and my attitude went straight to mission mode. Even though this was my first gig, I felt prepared and set about working my way through the property.
Prepared or not, there were two main problems that I attribute to being an inexperienced noob:
There is a glaring lack of HDR for this interior shot.
The first and most important problem was that I mistakenly set the camera to shutter priority for my bracketing shots and they all ended up too dark and with no real exposure variations to work with to build HDR (high dynamic range) photos. HDR is used to eliminate the over exposed windows and lights and the under exposed shadow areas in a photo. Well, that went total noob face palm. I don't expect to make that stupid mistake again. The very good news is that I took the time to take a backup shots in Auto Mode of everything, which all came out great and saved the day.
When I first looked at all those horribly dark exposures, my heart really sank. That would certainly spell the end of working with this realtor. Thank goodness for spending the time on the backups. They are a long ways from the caliber I expected to deliver, but they are also still at least as good or better than the majority of the photos I have seen on listings. My point is, although it could have been much better, I wont feel sorry to charge for my work and I don't see a reason that I won't get another chance.
The second, equally or possibly even more important failure now that I think about is is that I never really got the memo that they were very interested in video for this property. It had been mentioned, but I don't know why I didn't think it was important. By the time I got done with the photos, I got the feeling we should be moving on. I'll take the responsibility of not clarifying and in the future, it will be on paper before we get to the site. I don't ever want to make that mistake again either. Not only did I not completely satisfy the client, I robbed myself of the opportunity to add to my experience and portfolio and my income.
It took me a few hours over the next couple of days to edit the photos. I had my wife and daughters help me out with the finesse of the edits and I'm very thankful to them. They have good taste.
So, I have the first one done and made plenty of mistakes and learned from those mistakes. It's time to move on and keep working on it.