Where Technology Meets Creativity
We view our business as a learning enterprise.
Every year during December and January, we take time off to focus on what we’ve learned from our clients and how we can creatively apply it – along with improvements in technology – to our clients’ advantage.
This means working on our lighting and post-production skills, not just boning up on new technology. Technology enables photography – not the other way around – and photography is about (and has always been about) composition, color, light, shadow and intent. When people ask, “What makes for a good photograph?” That’s it.
Digital photography has produced a lot of lazy photographers. Press the button, you get five shots. Improperly frame your composition? No worries, just crop it in post-production (and lose resolution and color) and move on to the next shot. Over time, increasingly functional tools can degrade your basic skills as a photographer. Most of all, the fundamental intent of the photo gets lost.
It takes a real passion for visual art to resist these temptations and maintain a focus on the basics.
What makes this most challenging is the pace of change. The technology of imaging is advancing rapidly, particularly as AI is applied to photo and video post-production, camera color science, drone telemetry, and robotics. It’s easy to start spending more time playing with technology than actually practicing the basics.
We are most interested in new hardware and software that can save time and cost creating compelling visual experiences:
Improvements in on-camera color science. Getting good and consistent color straight out of the camera improves quality, reduces time-consuming and expensive post-production, making quality work affordable for our clients.
Improvements in the efficiency and quality photo and video post-production
The ethical use of AI in post-production and marketing
Cost-effective approaches to secure file sharing, better workflow and data management
A Word About AI
AI is a horizontal technology. It impacts everything. It is embedded inside camera firmware, post-production software, and business applications. General AI algorithms learn about patterns and suggest actions. Generative AI is a specific form of AI that is capable of generating text, graphics, images and video based on human instruction, or “prompts.”
What is “Ethical AI” in Photography?
In our marketing and technical work, this usually means following two truth-in-advertising golden rules:
Never use AI to misrepresent a subject. Example: Use AI to remove dust or lens flare, yes. Use it to remove power wires or an outlet on the wall, no.
Always inform the viewer when AI is being used to alter the substance of an image to avoid unintentional misrepresentation. Example: Most of our Matterport® 3D tours come with de-furnished views of every room, which can be toggled on and off by the viewer - but the viewer must always know the original state of the room. On still photos, we always slug de-furnished or virtually staged photos so the viewer knows what he’s looking at.
Everyone loves compelling, colorful images. But photographs used in marketing or technical projects need to have credibility. For example, we avoid fake twilight treatments and are very careful with sky replacement. If used, they must be subtle, or they risk losing credibility with the viewer, or worse, completely misrepresenting the property. We credit your viewer with intelligence: Dropping a Malibu sunset behind a prairie or mountain home in Idaho does nothing to persuade a viewer, even if catches his eyeballs for a few seconds. If anything, it may cause him to question the photos inside the house.
In California and elsewhere, new truth-in-advertising laws are coming to the real estate industry, but we shouldn’t need laws to make us face what we already know.
Despite AI (and increasingly because of it) there is nothing more credible or informative than an image captured by a real person, of a real thing or person, in a real place. AI can help with the refinement of the image or the removal of distractions. It can help remove red-eye, or lens flare and distortion, remove cars (not permanent features) from a landscape, save time retouching a mole on face, or blurring faces or text to preserve privacy. But ethical AI in our business means using it to optimize what we can see with our eyes, not to deceive them – and above all to convey what’s real.
Photography and Videography
We rely primarily on Leica and Hasselblad platforms for our still photography. Our Leica cameras double as video platforms for filming property walk-throughs, interviews, and short subject video.
3D Tours and Spatial Data
While we create 3D tours in many ways (Ricoh Theta for Zillow tours, mirror-less camera and drone camera to create and stitch 3D panoramas), we use Matterport Pro2 and Pro3 cameras for the majority of our marketing and technical projects..
For digital measurements, we use Leica Disto instruments.
Post-Production
We do the majority of our post processing work for both photography and video using the Adobe Creative Suite, supplemented by various utilities that perform specific functions, like panorama stitching and HDR photo processing. The fewer tools needed, the better.
We developed LandVision360 on the 3DVistaPro software platform.
Narration and Presenters
In 2024 we started using the Synthesia generative AI platform to dub narration and on-screen presenters for spot video in our tours as well as in video ads.
The platform is also used to create training video and marketing promotions. One of the reasons we chose Synthesia is its adoption of AI ethics and its decision to align it with the business models it supports - rather than pay for use, which requires no accountability for the content producer or the platform provider. You can read about Synthesia’s AI Ethics Framework here.
Panoramic Photography
We have many ways of creating panoramic photographs and 360º panoramas. We frequently use drones to do this, but from the ground we use a panoramic tripod head with our Leica camera and stitch the images ourselves - or if lower quality suffices, an auto-stitching Ricoh Theta 360 camera.
Client Web Sites
We use 3DVista Pro, a software development platform for building 3D experiences, to build our LandVision360 home and land tours., which are essentially web sites with embedded 3D and 2D media.
Between 3DVista and Squarespace, we have many ways to build affordable media web sites for our clients.
We put to work decades of experience in designing and producing web sites, with a focus not only on visual design but on usability.
