What a dusk shot costs, learned while holding a lamp cord out of frame

525 is cheap for what you described. I shoot my own on a phone with a clip-on wide lens for the thin ones and you can tell, the walls bow out at the corners. Paid a real shooter on a flip last spring because it was the nicest thing I'd ever listed and the saves on it were roughly triple my usual. Not a controlled experiment, but I stopped arguing with myself about the fee.

The 3D tour is the part that changed things for me on rentals. I put one up on a two bed and the number of people who walked it in person dropped by half, and the ones who did come already knew where the laundry was. Fewer tours, better tours.

How long was he in the house total, including the trip back at dusk? I'm trying to work out whether the price is mostly time or mostly the gear.

Dumb question, what does bracketed mean? Sable said bracketed exposures further up and I nodded along and then realized I had no idea.

@rigging he takes the same frame a few times at different brightness, one exposure for the dark room and one for the bright window, then blends them so you can see the yard through the glass instead of a white square. That's why interior shots look like the room and the view are both lit.

Run the 525 against a single listing and it stops being a decision. Even on a modest house it's a fraction of a percent of the price and it's the first thing every buyer sees. What I'd want to know is his cost per shoot after drive time and editing, because next-morning delivery on stills plus a scan means somebody was up late.

Half of that job is the prep you did without being asked. Cars, cans, toilet lids, counters cleared. When I schedule shoots I send the owner a list the day before and I still show up early because the list gets read as a suggestion.

Out where I look, the shooter drives 80 minutes each way and the travel charge is close to a quarter of the total. On a house priced under 150 that math gets loud. Two of the agents I've talked to just shoot their own and it looks like it.

The brokerage I'm joining wants photos live within 48 hours of the listing going active, which means you book the photographer before you have a signed price. That ordering seemed backwards to me until somebody pointed out the alternative is a listing sitting there with no pictures.

The cat smear staying in is the best part of this. Somebody's going to scroll that tour in two years and wonder what happened by the stairs.

Land is almost the reverse of what you described. Nobody needs interiors, and it's all aerial with the boundary drawn over the top of the image. I've seen those lines drawn wrong twice, and once by a lot.

Ask to see his contract sometime. Most of the ones I've read license the images for marketing that specific listing, and the license ends when the listing does. People pull old photos off an expired listing and reuse them on the next one and that's the photographer's copyright, not the seller's. Varies by what the agreement says, so read the agreement.

@fathom I genuinely thought if you paid for the photos you owned them. So the seller can pay 525 and not own the file. Adding that to the list of things I assumed wrong.