Commercial Real Estate – Sprint Store

Last week I was contacted by a real estate broker to produce images of a couple of new buildings.  One was a Sprint Phone store and the other is still vacant, but will be a Mattress One Store when finished.

Sprint Store 001

Sprint Store 002

Sprint Store 003

Double Helix

The Heart of Texas Professional Photographer’s Guild holds monthly competitions.  For August, the theme for one of the competitions was “Around in Circles.” Bryant Stanton is a local artist who works in metal and glass.  He was commissioned to do a chandelier and a sculpture for the new Science Building at the Community College.  His sculpture was in interpretation of the Double Helix.  I decided to work that up as my entry for the competition.  This was my final product, and it won the competition.

Double Helix

Commercial Real Estate

I got another call to do a Commercial Real Estate shoot.  This was for a local motel.  They wanted a variety of shots of the exterior and interiors of their three different room configurations. They wanted the exterior shot during the day and after sundown to show the lights. Here is after sundown.

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This was not a simple picture.  I started out intending to do an HDR, but the processing seemed to add noise to it.  So, I used the normally exposed frame.  I adjusted exposure and black level, added contract, and sharpened as I would normally do, but there were distractions.  They were in the process of installing something in the grass between this place and the one next door.  There was an orange net fence.  So, I cloned that out.  There was a street sign that was distracting.  So, that got cloned out as well.  Then there was the street in front of the place.  It was a large grey region in the foreground.  So, I burned it in to darken it and then blurred it to reduce any definition.

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This was the view of the double room configuration. The interior shots, too needed a great deal of help.  First of all, there were no drapes in these rooms.  The only thing to control the ambient light was mini blinds.  I used my two LCD video lights and set those up in the corners behind me.  Even at that, the exposure was dark.  So, I corrected exposure and black level, added contrast, and vibrancy and sharpened the image.  It still had some shadow problems, so, I moved the shadow slider up as far as it would go, and that really opened up the shadows.  The final thing was the perspective.  Every frame of this shoot was taken with a 10 – 20 lens, and there were serious perspective distortions as a result of the lens.  So, I took the images into photoshop and transformed them to remove the distorted perspective.  Now, all the lines are straight, and the end result was a usable image.

 

Real Estate Photography

I received an email last week out of the blue. I was asked if I could take pictures of a building for a California company who owned it.  They wanted pictures for their web site where they listed the building for sale.  In looking at their web site, I saw lots of pictures of buildings that were nice, but not really all that great photographically.  The object was obviously not to take a great picture of an ordinary building, but to take a picture of the building that depicted it accurately.

I had no idea what to charge them.  So, I gave them a figure.  I was told I was too high.  They normally pay less than I was asking.  That was OK with me, and I submitted a proposal/contract.  They returned it with a couple small changes, and we had a signed contract.

Monday I went to this building.  It is a call center for a defense contractor.  I started taking my pictures, and a security guard came out and told me I could not.  I explained what I was doing, and showed him the contract.  He went inside, and the head of security came out.  Both of them told me it was a “government facility” and no photos were allowed, but they both realized that there was really no way they could stop me as the building was not owned by the government.  Finally, he called the building manager, and I was told I could take my pictures but only of the exterior, and no employees could be recognizable.

So, I took my pictures. One of the stipulations on the contract was I was to include the building signage. The problem was there is no signage on the building. So, I took 20 pictures of a pretty normal, ordinary building.  Here are a couple.

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