On-line Presentation

Recently, my wife and I were in the market for a home. Like many buyers, we started researching homes online. Why not, the services are easy to use. What we found was not surprising. There were a lot of homes on the market, and a lot of really bad pictures. Finding the right home would be hard.

We did what 87% of the market does. We searched online first. The online sites allowed us to set parameters to help narrow the search down to the specifics. From there, we used pictures to narrow it further. If the front of the house or the interior were not appealing, we moved to the next house. Did we miss out on some good homes? Maybe! But... when your weeding through thousands of homes you have a much better chance of seeing "the one" when you weed out the ones that are not the one.

This process started over again when we started to work with a great agent in town. He helped direct us to some neighborhoods we hadn't considered, so we saw homes we never would have found. But we had to weed through another round of pictures online. As a buyer, it was extremely hard to look at the pictures of the mess, but it really helped to eliminate homes.

I would like to never think that there are bad homes on the market, but I will say there were a lot of bad pictures on the market. We saw pictures online that included dirty clothes, dirty dishes, pictures of a messy bed. But the best was the picture of the toilet, they even left the seat up. As a real estate photographer, it was more than hard to look.

However, when we get to the point of narrowing the options the real questions are these: How do we feel about the house? Can we see ourselves in this house? And how will our furniture look in this house? That's when the presentation starts to really leave impressions that later become emotions. If we have to look through "stuff" to see what our things will look like, we are distracted and our attention is lost leaving a bad impressions. If we like what we see, we focus our attention on the house and save that as a favorite.

Hear me out on this, people don't buy homes online, but the homes are sold online.

As for the result of our search. The presentation of the house we chose was "on the money". Then the walk through left me wondering if we could buy the furniture, too. It was then that I became emotionally tied.

Creating Emotion

Recently, I have taken the opportunity to catch up on long over-due reading. First to find out how I could better use the ideas I have rolling around in my head, and next to better use the images that I create.

One of my favorite blog sites brought to mind a topic that I have taken for granted: pictures should move us. They should create an emotion inside of the viewer, take us to another place, motivate us, draw us in. The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" is really true. Few words can describe what we feel at that exact moment we see something. But a picture can take us far away.

At the moment of writing this, I am in a happy place mentally and physically. I am at a place I enjoy going, and I am having my favorite iced beverage. Watching the rain fall on the parking lot and rain drops bouncing off the cars, people dancing in and out trying not get wet. I have the internet playing Pandora radio when a song Suffocation Keep by The Slip came on. Although I have never heard the song, it just adds to the feeling. I found myself transported to where I had once watched the rain come down this much. As I start to feel the joy of that place, it makes me smile inside and out: Ft. Wayne Indiana. My childhood home.

As I think of all the great places and people back there, another song plays and takes me even further: Send Me on My Way by Rusted Root.

Transported, I stare out of the window which is framed as if it were a camera lens. The words are true, a picture can take us away. It can create an emotion.

Home in Seattle

an old bus parked on the side of the road this morning offered itself up for a photograph. I thought it was only fitting after the road trip from Austin to Seattle the crew and I made just a month ago.