About Jim – I have been an active photographer since the early 1970s and a professional photographer for the last four decades. In the beginning years I primarily shot and processed B&W 35mm film on backpacking trips into the wilderness of Colorado and Utah. For the 40+ years while running my custom cabinet business, Doopoco Enterprises Fine Custom Cabinetry, I had used photography  to document our work and create galleries of our projects for our website and magazine features.

I have wanted to offer expertise in architectural photography and my eye to bring the best forward in a room, to the real estate business. I had started to go in that direction a few years back but was too busy with the cabinet business. Now that I have retired from creating cabinets, I am now offering my services as a photographer to real estate agents here in SW Colorado. My intention is to make extraordinary images that bring the best out of the spaces that you are offering for sale.

My Photographic Process

I use high quality Fujifilm GF lenses and sometimes specialized tilt-shift lenses, to straighten lines in camera on my Fuji GFX medium format camera to capture spaces in a realistic vision. I have the ability to make the smallest of spaces feel expansive or focus in on details that you feel are important for the sale of the property. The gallery shows a variety of examples of both wider point of view images and feature images with a higher weight of feature images further back in the galleries as this was the point of many of the photographs I took of our work at Doopoco Enterprises. Interior architectural photography is one of the most challenging in the sense of balancing the light. When I was documenting our cabinetry projects, I used a combination of exposure bracketing and the high dynamic range of my camera to the editing process where I then did color correcting and exposure tweaking.

I am now using a high end technique called “Flambient” or flash-ambient. The process includes a minimum of two images, one shot without lights (ambient) and one shot with lights. There are sometimes additional flash shots if there are window pulls needed and or a need to get even lighting in larger spaces. These images are then composited using specialized editing processes that create a photo that has perfect color balance and exposure. While it sounds complicated and time consuming it is actually the opposite when you take into consideration that HDR or bracketed photos have so many issues with incorrect color balance caused by so many different sources of light and softness that takes much more time to correct in editing. Even after correction HDR images don’t come close to the high end quality of a Flambient image. The majority of real estate photographers use HDR but I am choosing to offer the same quality of photos seen in end end luxury listings. The time onsite is just a little bit longer but we’re talking an extra minute or so per photo for standard sized rooms and a couple minutes more for large rooms.

My approach to “window pulls” is to use it if there is a benefit to showing the view out a window. The Flambient technique does a great job making  them realistic as the process allows me to get perfect exposure for the scene outside.

I am offering Matterport 3D tours to help your prospective buyers, especially out of town clients, walk through and get the feeling for a property.

I also offer drone photography. I am an FAA part 107 certified remote pilot and fly a Mavic Pro drone that produces high definition photographs and video.

Lastly, I love to produce video. I had a vlog for my landscape photography for a while which was fun to share my process and the places I photographed. I did drop it when it pulled too much away from my photography itself. Real estate videos is something I enjoy and strive to be the best at.

Unrelated, in a sense, is my landscape photography. I say in a sense as I’m not capturing structure and spaces but one of the most important components of any photograph is the composition and knowing how to bring the viewer’s attention to the subject at hand without altering the view of the landscape. Through composition I attempt to invite the viewer to journey through an image and take in the most important elements while presenting an accurate rendering of the room.

I hope this introduces what I intend to bring to your listings and that you will browse and enjoy the content on this site. I would love to hear from you, and if you are interested in hiring me for one of your listings or have any questions, please contact me.

For more information please visit the Pricing and the Booking pages.

Thank you for your time!