For the few of you that read my blog every week, you know that this week's blog is late due to an unexpected Real Estate Photo shoot.  As the location was not far from my mother's house I decided to walk.  It was a gorgeous, sunny day without a cloud in the sky, and as I only had to walk about a 1/2 mile, it made more sense.  Especially since as a rule in Real Estate photography you can't have cars in the driveway, so I'd b looking to park away from the house anyway. 

On the way back I was looking up and realized just how blue and vast the sky looks without clouds.  I don't know if it's because I have a toddler myself now and I'm just looking at the world with refreshed wonder, or if it really is such a rarity to me that it just struck me.  Having grown up in Buffalo we see gray skies usually from about September to around May.  June, July, and August we'll get a couple of cloud free days, but usually there are at least some clouds somewhere in the sky.  A truly cloud free day is a rarity.   Usually we have just the opposite and it's gray sky from horizon to horizon.  This doesn't even include that most days, I was stuck in an office without a window to the outside world, so even if the skies were blue and cloud free...I didn't see it.

What first made me notice how blue the sky was, was the walk up to the location.  As I've been doing Real Estate photography pretty steadily over the last year, it's always nice when you can have a beautiful day to shoot the exteriors.  Let's face it, if you're browsing for a new home online you don't want to see a gray, cloudy, depressing scene.  You want bright, happy, sunshine.   Plus, all that extra sunshine coming through the windows helps to light the room too.

Now when I'm able to I like to shoot exteriors during the golden hour, when the sun is setting, but a lot of times I just don't have that opportunity shooting homes.  The other problem with shooting golden hour photos, at least from a Real Estate perspective, is that it can change the color of the house. 

I have one Real Estate Agent that I work pretty exclusively with, and 9/10 she tells me what she wants, or doesn't want in a shot and I can give her the finished photos an hour after I get back to my computer.  It's always nice to have a quick turn around time and to be able to give the client what they want.  I'm thinking that perhaps next week, I'll go into some of the tips that I've picked up and that have been suggested to me both by her, and by other photogs.