real estate photography

has always been appealing to me. Since I started photographing properties for our website 10 years ago, I've learned an awful lot. A year or so back, I was Googling "real estate photography" or something, and came across Larry Lohrman's impressive website. When shooting a property that has beautiful views, one of the biggest challenges is how to avoid the burnt out (overexposed) windows. Since a camera can only shoot one exposure at a time, typically you expose properly for the inside of a house, only to end up overexposing the windows (views out the windows). There are a few methods of dealing with this. I can use layers and manipulate manually in PS, but that is a huge PIA, esp. since we have over 150 properties, and property photography is only about 10% of my job scope. Looking through Larry's site, he discusses several ways to deal with this contrast blending, or HDR (High Dynamic Range). Photoshopping can handle a myriad of scenarios, but again, having extreme time poverty and a seemingly endless list of properties to shoot, this is not efficient. There are photoshop plug-ins which speed up this process. And another bit of software called Photomatrix. Check out the pic below. I think this was 3 separate exposures. It is amazing. I will have to play with this some more.