Piers's Blog

Have you ever shot an exterior house photo and you get that lens flair spot? This is from strong light entering the lens at just the correct angle and bouncing till it hits the sensor, making circles, sheets of bright white overlay or covering the entire image and thus lowering the contrast. Ther...

  This was not a listing of ours but I had to show. This home on Sherier Pl. NW, Washington, DC was built in 1920. I would have felt this would have gotten renovated off but there it stands, in the capitol of the United States a home that still has an outhouse. The second part of this I found in...

This is another simple trick to making a room shot look better- move objects that are very close to you in the foreground­ out of the shot. A vase, flowers, or lamps, will just dominate the photo and detract from the room; the reason for this is the extreme stretch perspective of the wide angle l...

Rechargeable batteries are not as inexpensive compared to regular batteries, but in a few uses they will pay for themselves many, many times and a lot greener. I myself use a battery pack called a Quantum that gives me two weeks of mass shooting un-failed with a fast recharge. It is a rechargeabl...

This is part 2 of Shoot Horizontal When Possible, I posted 6/24/08. Now to talk about when you have to have the vertical.   When creating a fact sheet, as opposed to using a lesser photo (bathroom, hallway or detail) as one larger vertical put two vertical photos close together to make one horizo...

At our office every month we give accolades to the top sales of the month. The honor is called Maid of the Month. We do not keep a board of who has done what and how many, we just have our Tuesday meeting, the broker announces who was the top that month. Then it is my job. It is my job to come up...

As per my last blog, I use a Konica Minolta c6500. I love it. Very infrequently do we do offset for projects, except business cards and some local guides. I do have a few agents that do overprinting. Meaning they get a template done offset in large, 1000s of numbers to get the colors of their log...

In Mount Pleasant, Washington, DC in the summer of 2004, nine call boxes were converted from their useless state of decay into pieces of art that convey the area's history in little dioramas created by sculptor Michael K. Ross in a program called "Art on Call." The boxes show time periods of when...

I see many homes with the popular contacting of shelves in cabinets on homes that are being sold by older families. We have all seen flowers, plaid and stripes all in bright colors that say hello when you open a solid wood cabinet in a kitchen and  sometimes in the bathroom. But here is the best ...

Today I am going to switch gears a bit as I wanted to pass on what I use in-house to create fact sheets, postcards and other marketing materials for my agents. I am 500,000 prints into my new Konica Minolta c6500 printer that I acquired Aril 2007, this replaced the Konica Minolta cf5001. I use th...