My Day Job
My day job is a real estate photographer. I am very lucky that I live near some really affluent areas in Michigan. Remember the huge house in Out of Sight? It was filmed in Bloomfield Hills. Iget to see million dollar houses on a daily basis. It's awesome I do have to say!
I started shooting virtual tours about 9 years ago when realtors were just starting to use them. Back then I used a regular 
handycam on a motorized tripod and it went around in a circle. I had to fed-ex those big tapes back and forth to Canada and they usually took about a week to even get online and most people didn't have computers that were able to view them! Then the company I was shooting for got taken over by IPIX and we switched technology and started shooting stills that were then stitched and overlapped. The IPIX cameras were equipped with a fish-eye lens and we took only 3 shots of each room, which gave a full 360 view. However they really distorted the image and the shots had to be taken perfectly. If you even looked at the tripod wrong (let alone bump into it like I do all the time!) you had to reshoot it. Then that company was taken over by Homestore...then Virtual Imaging Corp and that last company went bankrupt last October with this terrible economy.
handycam on a motorized tripod and it went around in a circle. I had to fed-ex those big tapes back and forth to Canada and they usually took about a week to even get online and most people didn't have computers that were able to view them! Then the company I was shooting for got taken over by IPIX and we switched technology and started shooting stills that were then stitched and overlapped. The IPIX cameras were equipped with a fish-eye lens and we took only 3 shots of each room, which gave a full 360 view. However they really distorted the image and the shots had to be taken perfectly. If you even looked at the tripod wrong (let alone bump into it like I do all the time!) you had to reshoot it. Then that company was taken over by Homestore...then Virtual Imaging Corp and that last company went bankrupt last October with this terrible economy. 
So I am now completely self employed and shooting tours all over the place in the metro Detroit area. I love it! The only drawback is that I want to redecorate my own house on a daily basis. So, I figured I would share some photos of my most recent houses. I've been shooting houses that are at least 1 million if not closer to 3 million.
