The Ken Burns approach is actually very effective. Sharon Nyman, a Realtor in Key Largo, FL that shoots her own photos told me that when she purchased a TV spot on spotrunner.com, spotrunner sent a well known professional videographer down to Key Largo to shoot her video. But after the video was edited the Spotrunner decided to do the Ken Burns thing on photos that Sharon had taken. She said in the end everyone in the process agreed that panning over her still photos made a better TV spot than the video that the professional had shot.

The great thing about this Ken Burns approach is not hard to do yourself. There are a couple of very easy ways to do the panning and create Ken Burns type video.

1. Use monoslideshow which is a add on web template that you can add to Lightroom. You don’t have to have light room to create monoslideshows, Light room just makes it easier. I’ve talked about this before. The disadvantage with monoslideshow is that you cannot control every aspect of the panning. Monoslideshow does the panning automatically and you can give it a few parameters that tell it how much panning to do. This is the quick and easy way.
2. The other way to do panning is to use an application like Imagematics. This application allows you to precisely control every aspect of panning over still images and then write either a flash movie or other movie formats. My Friend Kevin at eSiteTours.com introduced me to Imagematics a number of years ago. This is the application that Kevin uses to produce the “movie” slide show tours (press the “Movie Slideshow” button) available at eSiteTours.com.

The bottom line on Ken Burns type video is that I think you will continue to see more an more of this type of video because it is easy to create, it is less expensive to produce than real video, it looks great and in the real estate context many people cannot tell the difference between this and video shot with video equipment.

As with all hosting changes there will be a period of 24 to 48 hours that it takes all the name servers around the world to update and get the new address through the miracle of Domain Name Server updating. During this period some people will get the old blog and some will get the new blog. For that period I’ll be posting on both the new and the old blog.

I’m using this move as an opportunity to improve the organization of the blog and all the articles etc that I’ve done over the last several years.

For the comparison is used a 360VR image above of my grandson Morgan standing beside the Spruce Goose, SR71 and Atlas missile at the Evergreen Aviation Museum. Since I originally prepared the image for QuickTime I decided to include the QuickTime image. This image that was used as input to all of the players below is a 3600×1800 JPG file that is 1.15 MB. Here’s how it looks in each of the players:

QuickTime from: Apple
Pano2VR from: Garden Gnome Software
Immervision from: Immervision
FPP (Denis Chumakov) from: Flashpanoramas.com

By looking at the same image in all 4 players you can get a feeling for any differences in the load time, rendering or smoothness of these players. I have a hard time seeing any differences between the 4 different players. I’ll let you be the judge of the quality of the different players.

Another factor, which I haven’t compared is the ease of use of each of these players. My general assessment is that Immervision is probably the most involved and Pano2VR is probably the easiest. But there are other strong and weak points of each of the Flash players. I’ll have to leave that for another post.

Tabb makes this all look easy but it’s not. Back in the spring of 2006 Tabb told me he had around $15,000 invested in his electric RC chopper that carries a Canon 5D with 15mm lens mounted on the bottom. I see from his site he’s added a video camera. Be sure to see his video trailer here. Wow, what fun! I want a RC chopper!

This is the kind of aerial photography that is totally unique. I came very close to hiring Tabb a year or so ago for a Lake Washington waterfront listing we were competing for. I wanted to get shots of the front of the home coming in off the water. We didn’t get the listing.

I must admit that I’m not all that into the social networking scene although I already had a facebook profile because my cousin Nik was on facebook and I wanted to follow some of his activities. Shaun’s point is that he has already gotten some RE photography business from his facebook business page by simply letting his facebook friends know about his business.

I’m interested in promoting this blog so I thought it would be a good way to get links from facebook to PFRE. I’ve heard that google “likes” links from social sites. So I built a facebook page for PFRE. I also found that 20% of my gmail address book were already on facebook so I invited all those folks to be “my friend” and become a “fan” of PFRE. I noticed today that the blog is already starting to get traffic from facebook.

I think Shaun is right, creating a facebook profile and business page is at least good website promotion and if you use it well it can bring you clients if you are a RE photographer or Realtor.

Feel free to become a PFRE fan if you are on facebook.

VRmag issue 28 is now online. For those that haven’t seen it before VRmag is a online 360AVR magazine with articles (45 articles in this issue) on panoramic photography show casing the work of some of the best panographers in the business. Here are just a couple of items I thought my be of interest based on recent posts and comments:

1. PTgui Pro 7 Article by Pat St. Clair : There was a question about PTgui Pro 7 in the last post and this article is I think a particularly good look at PTgui Pro 7 and how it works.
2. Flash Interior panorama by Patrick Cheatham : This is a link to a pano by Patrick Cheatham that illustrates a great high quality interior Flash pano. Also of interest is the tour template that Patrick has built for Flash panos.

This is good technique for real estate photography since it can cut down on your equipment investment if you have the Photoshop skills necessary to do the compositing image.

Thanks Marcus for this tutorial, I’d heard of this technique but have not seen it explained so well before.

Anyone that has shot 360 panoramas will immediately appreciate the importance of HDR as a technique to control brightness in a situation where you must lock your exposure for all shots yet in one of the shots you have to shoot into the sun and another you have to shoot away from the sun. HDR is an clearly and important technique for panographers. As shown by the recent addition of HDR processing into PTgui PRO, the grand old 360 stitching application.

There seem to be a number of photographers also using HDR to shoot interiors to eliminate carrying lighting equipment or to avoid having to learn to use lighting equipment. The thing that has bothered me in the past about HDR is it seems you can always instantly spot a HDR image. The HDR typical look is either “grungy” (the walls look like they need scrubbing) or “radioactive” (the space looks like it will be another 1,000 years before its safe to go in). I think either of these looks may be appropriate for creative photography where you are trying for an unusual look. But not for real estate photography.

There is a middle ground though. The image above, by Joe Noel, from the PFRE photo discussion group last week is a great example that shows it possible to use HDR that doesn’t have the typical HDR look. In the discussion of this photo people thought that Joel use flash until he pointed out that he didn’t. I’ve noticed that these “normal” looking images produced with HDR processing have a soft look to them with not an abundance of crisp whites or an abundance of deep blacks but plenty of mid-tones. Another way of characterizing the look is that they have a wide-full histogram. This is the histogram for the image above:

I guess this makes sense since that’s what HDR is about; taking a wide range of tones and mapping them into a smaller histogram. It’s not surprising then, that there are an abundance of mid-tones. This same “soft” look that comes from an abundance of mid-tones is present in Kevin’s HDR processed 360 images from eSiteTour that I showed a few posts ago.

So my main point of all this is that for real estate photography it is important to shoot for “normal” looking images that don’t have the “grunge” or the “radioactive” look because either of these “looks” will distract the viewer from the the main purpose of the photo: the property.

A secondary point is that if you don’t like the characteristic soft, full histogram, look of normal HDR image you can give them more punch by using Lightroom or Photoshop to move the tone curve of the final image to look the way you want.

1. The new export dialog – There are fairly extensive improvements here as well as the release of an export developers SDK so developers can build custom export applications.
2. More Airtight galleries added to the Web module – I’ve talked about the Airtight galleries for Lightroom in previous posts. Now Adobe has included the Simpleviewer, Postcardviewer and Autoviewer in the 1.3 distribution.

LRN is one of my favorite Lightroom resources. Another great (but a little more geeky) LR resource is Lightroom Journal done by Lightroom developers…LJ has the inside stuff straight from the “horse’s mouth”.

It’s worth noting that according to the LR developers there are still several outstanding problems with LR running on Leopard that are still unresolved as of LR 1.3:

1. Time Machine compatibility — Disable Time Machine on LR directory
2. Print Module bug
3. Lightroom/Finder compatibility
4. Import problem when importing directly from memory cards

Wow, I thought 1.3 fixed the Leopard issues but it sounds like there is still a ways to go. I’m glad that Adobe understands the value of transparency. I like understanding the outstanding problems instead of running into them unexpectedly!