Temecula Valley Professional Photography

I am pleased today I have Tom Barnett with Thomas Barnett photography. He's a professional photographer serving our community and we have done a lot of photo shoots together for real estate. Truly a joy to work with. Drama free he gets the job done. And it truly is my honor to interview you today. I'd love to hear your story. Tom, I know you haven't been a photographer all your life. Like me, we reinvented ourselves and a new career. Tell us your why. Thank you for having me. I love doing this and I love that you asked me. So my why I worked in manufacturing For almost all my life until about four or five years ago when I got into this, and I hated every moment of my job working for corporations, you know, I was a printer for 25 years and, and worked in medical devices, here in Temecula locally. And so I discovered that I love photography and even so when I was back in printing, I was I used to work in the darkroom. And I thought it would be great to take wonderful photos like this. And I started going out and photographing various things. We live in a wonderful area where we're close to the mountains to the ocean to the desert, and I would go every I would look forward to every weekend, and then you know, with digital coming in, you know, so that meant Photoshop and Lightroom and I went online and I took classes online. Learning how to edit my photos, so that they weren't just flat photos and, and, and, you know, I never planned on using it I just did it for myself. And then the company I talked about in in Temecula laid me off, and I had to find something quickly. But I thought, Well, what I have to do something and what do I know how to do his photography? By then I was decent. And so I thought, well, I can do portraits, and who needs portraits? I thought realtors, and they're all their information is public. So I started going online and I got I started sending out emails to realtors following up with a phone call in a couple of days. And eventually Somebody said, Well, I don't need my portrait done, but can you shoot a house for me? And I said, I'd never done this before, but I just I need I studied all I could about you know, shooting houses and, and I was horrible, but I got better and I kept improving and I, I have some wonderful realtors in those early days who stuck with me, you know, and, you know, and I would I used to bend over backwards for, for the people I work with my realtors and I, I I still do. And I think, you know, my my goal was to just keep improving, and I still have that goal today. So a lot of people say they're going to sell their home at some point. We know 95% of all home searches begin on the internet. With that said, What can our home sellers do to make sure their home photographs at its best. I send out a list to everybody, all my realtors have before I work with them. And hopefully they retain that list and they and they're passing it on to their sellers. But it has all kinds of details that that will help each seller you know, get their house ready, it's a call to photo ready list. But the the main thing, less is more means go through and if you have any questions about this item, yeah, it probably needs to go go hide it in a closet or in your garage or something like that. You know, and that is the key thing that I think I would like to pass on to your sellers. After I get done editing all the photos professionally, I upload them to a platform called HD photo hub calm, and I love this, this group there they always help me with that. With issues that, you know, I hadn't thought of that might come up while I don't do video, I they take all my my photos, my still photos, and they put them into a slideshow with music and you can replace the music to your tastes and, and you can. It also offers ready made brochures which you can drag ...