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8 Awesome Ways to Use Your Car to Shoot Great Video | Bedford Corners Realtor

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A lot of times, amateur filmmakers forget the everyday objects and items they use everyday which can be used to enhance their videos.  They are easy to overlook.  After all, that rolling chair in your office couldn’t possibly be used as a dolly, could it?  That’s for sitting and nothing else.  Well, as it turns out, your car can be used for video, too, and it has even more mobility and versatility than even an office chair.  With a hat tip to Ricardo at Wooshi, we thought we’d take a look at Derek Beck’s entertaining video called, “Drive-By Shooting: Using Your Car to Make Better Videos,” and break it down.

How to Use Your Car as a Video Production Tool

Derek Ward teams up with amateur filmmakers Neko Neko Productions to create this tutorial, and he writes out the instructions for each step.  First, let’s take a look at the video:

What do they tell you first?  Well, be careful.  You’re driving your car around here.  You need a clear road, and you need to drive with safety in mind, and sometimes, you’ll have a guy looking through a camera who might be in a precarious position.  So don’t be stupid.

1. Using Your Car As A Dolly

– From the Trunk

The first shot we see is of Derek walking along towards the camera as it moves away from him.  We see the camera operator sitting in the open trunk of the car as the car drives slowly.  And the effect is simple, almost like they had a professional dolly track.  They also show this vantage point being used for a slow-push “dramatic” shot.

– Out the Side Window, From the Backseat

Another vantage point is from one of the side windows of the car, with the camera on a tripod in the backseat.  This method can capture side dolly shots of people slowly walking.  What’s more, if you don’t have a tripod, they suggest using a bag of rice to keep the camera steady at the bottom part of the window frame.

– From the Front

The camera hangs outside one of the front windows and needs to be mounted safely so that it doesn’t fall out the window and crash to its death.  The framing needs to be done so that the front of the car can’t be seen, just your subjects (unless, of course, you want people to know it’s in a car).  With this vantage point, the camera can capture people running or another car or anything that might need speed to keep up with.

2. Audio Issues and How to Avoid Them

– Overdub the Dialogue

You may need to do some ADR (automated dialogue replacement), or overdub the dialogue in a more controlled environment, if you don’t want that car engine to be in the soundtrack.  But, there’s another way:

– Get Out And Push

Turn the engine off, put it in neutral, and you can guide the car where you’d like. You’ll have to get a boom mike or something similar to hang outside the car to record the dialogue.  Notice from here they’ve turned the car’s tires slightly so that when they push, the camera can slowly circle the subject.

3. Helicopter View Effect

If you happen to know a place where driving on an overpass can get you close and personal with the tops of buildings, you can add helicopter blades in post and it makes it look like you’re flying around the building, provided you keep any part of the car out of the frame, of course.

4. The Out-Of-Body Effect

There’s that effect where you see the main character in the center of the frame and no matter where he goes, he remains in the center.  The effect is hard to pull off in a car, and in the description of this shot they say it’s probably easier to pull off in a truck.

5. Elevated Platform

If your car’s roof is sturdy enough, it can be used to get that perfect bird’s-eye view.  Yeah, don’t try this when the car is in motion.

6. Fake Driving

By simply giving your subject something circular to hold onto and keeping your fake steering wheel out of the shot, you can safely shoot a person “driving” in the backseat of the car.  Just keep the frame tight where only the actor’s head, arms, and the window are in view.  With someone else actually driving, the car can be in motion and the subject doesn’t have to keep an extra careful eye on the road (although, the effect would be ruined if the subject just sits and talks to the camera the whole time).

7. Ditching Your Car Effect

This requires a couple of shots, then matching them later in editing.  First, you’ve got to shoot the car driving past a certain point.  Then, your subject, safely out of the car and on the far side of the road, will pretend to “jump” out by rolling and standing.  In post, this requires matching similar frames from the first shot and the second shot to complete the effect.  Selling the effect may require a separate shot of the actor opening the door from inside the moving car and pretending to jump out.

8. Pretending to Hit Someone with Your Car Effect

This requires some post-production reversing.  Create a mark for where your subject is standing.  Start with your actor in his “post-crash” state and slowly move the car backwards.  When the car reaches the mark, the actor should slide off the hood and stand up.  The car moves out of the frame.  The way they did this effect here was they shot Derek saying a few words, then they matched a shot from the sequence they wanted to reverse, then sped up the reverse shot, making it look almost seamless.

By the way, if you want more amazing car stuff, Film Riot, unsurprisingly, has also made a few great videos involving cars, including “Driving In A Car Without Driving A Car:”

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In that tutorial, they use three different methods to achieve this effect.  Green screen, rear projection, and special effects lighting are all covered.

And that’s not all.  They also have one where you can “Drive Fast Without Driving Fast,” which we actually broke down in this article.

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With Derek and Neko Neko Productions’ tutorials, and the accompanying videos from Film Riot, you can do almost anything you want with cars, except, hopefully not wrecking them.

via reelseo.com

One of Five Say it’s a Good Time to Sell | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate

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Last month the largest percentage of Americans since the housing bust said they believe it’s a good time to sell house, according to the latest Fannie Mae National Housing Survey.

Results from show Americans’ optimism about the recovery of the housing market and with regard to homeownership continued its gradual climb, bolstered by a series of mortgage rate decreases experienced throughout the summer. Consumer attitudes about the economy also improved substantially last month, breaking the progression of waning confidence seen during much of this year.

Survey respondents expect home prices to increase an average of 1.5 percent in the next year. The share who say mortgage rates will increase in the next 12 months dropped 7 percentage points to 33 percent. Nineteen percent of those surveyed say now is a good time to sell, marking the highest level since the survey began in June 2010. Tying the June 2012 level (and the all-time high since the survey’s inception), 69 percent of respondents said they would buy if they were going to move.

With regard to the economy overall, 41 percent of consumers now believe the economy is on the right track, up from 33 percent last month, while 53 percent believe the economy is on the wrong track, compared with 60 percent the prior month. Both the right track and wrong track figures mark the highest and the lowest readings, respectively, since the survey began in June 2010.

Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed expect home prices to go up in the next year, the highest level since the survey’s inception in June 2010. Thirty-three percent of respondents say mortgage rates will go up in the next year, a decrease of 7 percentage points since last month. Those who say now is a good time to buy dipped slightly to 72 percent.

.Consumer optimism climbed in September, with 41 percent saying the economy is on the right track – the highest level recorded since the survey’s inception and an 8 percentage point increase over last month. Forty-four percent of respondents expect their personal financial situation to improve over the next year, up from 42 percent in August.

The share of respondents who say their household income is significantly higher than it was 12 months ago decreased by 3 percentage points to 17 percent. Thirty-four percent of those surveyed say their household expenses are significantly

via realestateeconomywatch.com

What not to use online home value estimates for | Bedford Corners Realtor

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Q: What is your take on online home value estimates on houses? My real estate person says they shouldn’t be paid attention to, but I think they’re pretty close. What do you think?

A: Monitoring online home value estimates is a fixation of many a Web-savvy real estate consumer. It can be more than a little addictive to watch the value of your own home, the homes in the areas you’d like to live, and even, some say, your friends’ and relatives’ addresses move up and down with the market. I strongly believe that these estimates can be useful, if you understand how they are determined, how they can be skewed, and what they should and should not be used for.

Let’s explore precisely these issues now:

1. Understand how these home value estimates are determined. Ten years ago, if you wanted to get any sort of idea what a home might be worth, you had to consult with a real estate agent (or a few, if you wanted to get to a relatively reliable number), hire an appraiser (at the cost of a few hundred bucks) or, well, sell the house! I say that because the well-accepted definition of a home’s value is entirely dependent upon what a qualified buyer would pay for it at any given moment, in an arm’s-length transaction (“arm’s length” simply indicates that it’s not an insider deal, but rather a deal between strangers).

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This means that a home’s value changes over time, reflecting market dynamics like supply, demand, interest rates and the mortgage lending environment, so ultimately, any projection of a home’s value is truly only an estimate unless and until the home is sold — then, the sale price is the definitive answer of what the property was worth at closing.

This also means that the best way to estimate a home’s value is to look at what similar, nearby homes have actually sold for, as close as possible to the time the home’s value is being estimated. That’s what appraisers do; that’s what real estate agents do; and that’s ultimately what these online home value estimates attempt to do.

These websites build algorithms, just a funny word for calculations, that do their best to replicate the home value estimation process of real estate professionals, by pulling a description of your home from the public records available from your city or county, pulling other publicly available records of the recent sales prices of similar or comparable homes in your area, and making mathematical adjustments to create a rough estimate of your home’s price based on how similar or different it is from the “comparables” (especially on measurable factors like number of bedrooms, bathrooms and square footage) and how your overall local real estate market has moved in the time since those comparables actually sold.

2. Understand the margin for error and the factors that make your own home’s estimate more or less reliable. Keep in mind that the key difference between an automated online estimate of a home’s value and the estimate your appraiser or agent might provide is the fact that the latter are professionals (and humans!), with the ability to detect physical, aesthetic, condition and location nuances that a computer relying on public record data will simply never be able to appreciate. As a result, online estimates have a much larger margin of error than the estimates of human professionals typically do.

Many online sources actually provide the data on how accurate (or inaccurate) their home value estimates are on a monthly, city-by-city basis, if you snoop around in the fine print portions of the website. I’ve seen some say they are as accurate as being within 7 percent of the home’s later sale price, on average, in a given town, and others say they are as inaccurate as 40 percent or more off in a city. That would mean that on average, in a specific town, homes actually sell for 40 percent more or less than the value estimate the site provided for that same property in the month that it sold!

And that’s really inaccurate. The error potential for online estimates is precisely why most real estate agents find them to be wildly unreliable, especially when they can offer you a human, professional estimate (of course, sellers probably think that human professionals have other issues, like bias, which is sometimes true, but the subject of a different article!).

One way you can begin to assess how accurate your home’s estimate is likely to be is to understand the circumstances that impact these estimates’ reliability. Automated online estimates are more likely to be accurate when:

  • The home and surrounding homes are newer (public records are more likely to be accurate for newer homes).
  • Your home has not had many unpermitted upgrades or additions.
  • Your home is located in a tract or subdivision where most surrounding homes are similar aesthetically and otherwise.
  • Your home is located in a neighborhood, district and town where the areas within a few miles’ radius are relatively similar in school district quality and desirability to buyers.

On the other hand, automated online estimates are less likely to be accurate when:

  • Your homes and surrounding homes are older.
  • Your home and/or surrounding homes have had lots of changes and additions over the years.
  • Your home is located in an area where nearby properties vary widely in style, size, even usage types (i.e., you have single-family homes, apartment buildings, condos and commercial properties all in the same area).
  • Your home is located near the boundary of a city, county, school district or neighborhood that is very different from yours.

3. Be careful what you use estimates for. Because of these strengths and weaknesses, it’s critical that you be very careful what you use online home estimates for.

I believe that the best uses are to track movements in the value of your home and your area’s homes over long periods of time, like you might want to do if you are considering refinancing when you get to a certain value or if you want to apply to your lender to have a private mortgage insurance policy removed at a certain value benchmark.

You also might use these online estimates to determine whether your home’s value is so far off from its tax-assessed value that you should consider applying to have the assessed value reduced.

However, I don’t think these online estimates are well-used to determine the list price of your home. Overpricing is such a serious, potentially harmful misstep (it turns otherwise interested buyers off and can cost you thousands if you overprice and your home lags on the market) that I’d encourage you to opt for getting several estimates of your home’s value from experienced, local agents or even to get a formal appraisal, if your budget allows. Use these human professionals’ value estimates as the basis of your home’s list price.


via inman.com

You’re chasing connections, but consumers value information | Bedford Corners Realtor

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I recently had the good fortune to hear Jeffrey Cohen, manager of content marketing at Salesforce’s Radian 6 Marketing Cloud, when we were both keynoting at the Social Media Strategies Summit. His presentation was solid and leaned heavily not just on data, but real data from real sources he was able to cite. This is all too rare in social media presenters.

I, of course, loved it. So when he mentioned via Twitter some recent LinkedIn changes, I took notice.

It wasn’t just the promise of learning about some new features of a digital tool that got me though. It was his assertion that the LinkedIn changes represented “another step toward information over connections.”

Hold that thought for a moment. Before looking at what this means for your real estate business, we’re going to explore how the emergence of new technology platforms complicates the task of gaining direct access to customers, and locking them in.

Stability versus direct access

In technology and maybe other aspects of life, there is a constant layering of ideas, services and products one on top of the other in a mad race to maintain a combination of stable business and direct access to the customer.

These two things — stable businesses and direct access to the customer — are probably diametrically opposed. A stable business usually would require a minimum of changes and variables leading to a high degree of predictability. Customers, on the other hand, are pretty much the definition of mercurial change and unpredictability.

For technology companies, stability often comes in the form of controlling access to a deep layer of technology. We see this in the form of vendor lock-in, for example. Lock-in can be overt, as in the requirement to use proprietary software and hardware. Lock-in can be subtle, as is the case with services that have a high “switching cost.”

To maintain the stability, the technology company needs to provide something of value that overcomes whatever lock-in is being applied.

Direct access to the customer, on the other hand, can come from following taste and fashion. Businesses and organizations that are serious about succeeding tend to foster the ability to listen and observe human behavior in order to stay ahead of the taste/fashion curve. This sort of observation leads to developing new tools and services that maintains their direct access to customers.

So we end up with a constant interplay between chasing direct access and locking it down for stability.

At a high level we can see this in the history of computing itself over the past 30 years. First there was the operating system. There was wide variation in the software, which talked directly with the hardware. A great deal of competition occurred on this theme and then settled out to being primarily Microsoft Windows, with a smattering of other also-rans.

But just as that stability was being locked in by Microsoft, the World Wide Web started capturing the attention of customers. The race was on once again, with the browser wars that began in the late 1990s. Those of us who cut our teeth coding for the Web in this era are all too familiar with the lock-in shenanigans of technology companies during this era (the remnants of which still linger more than 10 years later, in the Cro-Magnon, Explorer-only Web interfaces often employed on the backend of many multiple listing services).

With the rise of the Web, customer access at the operating system level became less important. There was less ability to lock-in customers. The effect of this is to turn much of what made for an effective operating system business into an anchor. Stability is great until there’s too much stability. Paralysis is a form of stability that isn’t desirable.

In the past five years we’ve begun to experience the rise of the social Web. Instead of the wide-open Web, customer interest and activity is tending to focus in on the sorts of things offered by social networks.

In the same way that the World Wide Web layered itself on top of the platform of the operating system, the social Web is layering itself on top of the Web. None of the lower levels of the platforms go away. They are still around in the same way that live theater continues to exist even though we have movies (or the way movie theaters are still around even though we have Netflix). Still present, but less important. The deeper levels have more stability but less direct access to customers.

In the past three years we’ve seen this layering occur in the mobile phone business. The rise of smartphones layering on top of the platform of carrier stability.

Currently we’re beginning to see a layering of data businesses over other types of businesses. Which brings me back to Jeffrey Cohen’s “information over connections.”

Information over connections

For platforms to emerge and gain enough direct customer access to apply some sort of lock-in, they typically will address some unserved need.

The current ascendent technology platform — the social Web — is focused on connections. There are friend counts and follower counts. A tithe of pixels on many websites implores people to add some sort of additional connection.

Why do we want to increase connections? As people, we want a variety of kinds of information.

Some of it is basic emotional stuff: I want people to like me, I want to fit in, I want to be part of a group so I don’t feel so alone in the world.

Some of it is more utilitarian stuff: I want to know how to accomplish a certain task; I want to hear about various options; I want to know more about the world I live in.

The point here is that “connection” is the platform layer that is currently ascendent or dominant just like the operating system once was. The thing that flows to (and from) us via connection is information.

Perhaps, in the same way that the Web was layered over the operating system, we will see a layering of information over connection.

Implications for real estate

For the people who have made it this far, through the history of technology layers and abstractness of connections and information, let’s see if we can’t tease out some direct and specific thoughts for the real estate business. For fun and enjoyment, I’ll present them as koans in bullet list form:

  • If a brokerage currently thrives due to a large volume of agent connections, will this help or hinder in an environment where information is more valued?
  • Will an agent who thrives due to large investments in emotional connections thrive in a world where information moves quickly?
  • Are the needs of real estate consumers more readily met with connection or information?
  • Given the current state of interbrokerage agreements, how much lock-in is available in a high-information environment? How much customer access is granted?
  • Which groups thrive most in a high-information environment: aggregators, brokerages, agents, tech vendors, real estate consumers?
  • Which groups thrive most in a high-connection environment: aggregators, brokerages, agents, tech vendors, real estate consumers?
  • Are any industries operating in a post-connection environment? Are any geographies more likely to be operating in a post-connection environment?
via inman.com

Housing Fever Can Work Both Ways | Bedford Corners NY Realtor

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We would all like to think that our economy makes more sense than that, and, in some ways, it does.

Certainly, there were other factors behind this boom and bust. But many of them — for example, Federal Reserve actions, government policies toward housing, even the effects on the United States of developments in other countries’ economies — were arguably driven by this same social epidemic.

In 2004, there was little about the economic climate that would explain why a housing peak should be coming soon. The world was widely believed to be slowly emerging from the early-2000s recession, which had been associated with the bursting of the stock market bubble of the 1990s. The stock market was just starting to recover. It seemed a time of healing. But something else, hard to discern, was driving things.

Recognizing when you are being caught up in a social epidemic is often difficult. As a first-time father, 30 years ago, I wanted to give my son a name that was less common than mine. There were far too many other “Bobbies” and “Bobs” when I was growing up. My wife, Virginia, and I settled upon the name Benjamin, which was my father’s name, and which seemed a rarer choice.

But when Ben got to kindergarten, there was another Ben in his class, and we soon realized that we had somehow chosen a common and trendy name. In fact, according to Popular Baby Names by Decades, a Web page from the Social Security Administration, the name Benjamin rose from a ranking of 130th in the 1960s to 31st in the 1980s. (It moved up to 25 in the 2000s.) Its popularity probably grew even faster in our own circles. Others were giving this name to their wee ones in a slow contagion. How we were influenced still mystifies us, though my wife does recall meeting one other baby Ben in the months before our son was born.

Most people seem to know that social epidemics are occurring, at least at some level. In fact, the term “going viral” has been going viral itself. A Google Trends search confirms that the phrase has taken off in the last few years. It is possible to go deeper — to ask what people are thinking, and infer something about the social epidemics that drive the economy.

KARL CASE, of Wellesley College, and I have been trying to do that for over a decade. We have conducted an annual mail survey of home buyers for years, with a total now of nearly 5,000 completed questionnaires. The survey, supported by the Yale School of Management, has covered the years leading up to the 2006 peak in home prices, and the years of disappointment thereafter.

The mailed questionnaire survey posed multiple-choice questions and a number of open-ended essay questions, where respondents could fill in their answers in their own words. Anne Thompson of McGraw-Hill Construction joined us in analyzing the data we collected, and we presented our paper “What Have People Been Thinking?” last month at the Brookings Institution.

We found that those who filled out our questionnaires were generally well informed about recent home price trends, and that their expectations for the next year’s home price appreciation were actually on the sober side. There were no signs of bubble thinking in these short-run expectations.

But expectations about long-term price appreciation — for what home prices would do over the next 10 years — were less sober. The data showed some odd patterns, not easily tied to any objective data. How does anyone know where home prices will go over 10 years? Somehow, people form opinions about the vague and distant future — just as they form opinions about baby names — and these opinions are crucial in their home-buying decisions.

Notably, in 2004, when the housing boom was going gangbusters, even though the 30-year mortgage rate was above 6 percent, our survey tells us that people expected long-term home price growth of over 12 percent a year. In other words, if you borrowed 90 percent of the money to buy a $100,000 house, you would expect to make $12,000 on the house’s appreciation, and pay $5,400 interest, for a one-year profit of $6,600 — a return of 66 percent in just one year on the down payment of $10,000.

So you can see why people were excited about real estate back then. It’s not that they were sure that home prices could never fall. Rather, they thought that the long-term trend was so strongly upward that any conceivable short-run price falls would surely be reversed, and then some.

Since then, the mortgage rate has fallen to well under 4 percent, but long-term expectations, as we measured them, have fallen faster, so that the earlier 6 percent spread is undeniably gone. That does a lot to explain the slow markets we have been observing lately.

BUT why did people have such extravagant expectations, and why did they change so abruptly?

We don’t really know. But in our 2004 survey, when the rate of home price increase was highest, people wrote that they were thinking about ever-growing population and limited land, about economic growth and eager Asian investors, about “flippers” making hot trades. All of these ideas suggested that it was important to dive in sooner rather than later. If Cousin Bill’s housing investment looked enviable, you might not hesitate to buy a home, even at a price that seemed a bit high.

No respondents volunteered the phrase “housing bubble” on our questionnaires that year, as if it never crossed their minds that housing booms could come to an ugly end. That’s remarkable, given people’s recent experience with stock market losses. They all apparently thought that housing was different back then.

After 2004, the use of “housing bubble” grew among our survey participants. And a Google Trends search confirms that there was a huge burst in Web searches for “housing bubble” in 2005. That seems to be when many people were thinking, “Just what is a housing bubble, anyway?” and had to learn once and for all what it meant.

People waiting to buy a home may be waiting for a sense that prices have a rosy long-term future. Home prices in the United States have been rising for several months, and that is generating some optimism that now is the time to buy. However, the social waves also carry other, less encouraging stories that compete with such optimism — for example, foreclosures, unemployment, Europe’s troubles and the Asian slowdown.

Will optimism about real estate emerge as a leading story? If this is a major upturning point for the housing market, it is still sociologically opaque.

via nytimes.com

Is it Really Worth $600 to Upgrade From an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5? | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate

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I set my alarm for 2:55 a.m.

Think about that for a moment. I purposefully woke myself up in the middle of the night to spend $549 on something that I certainly do not “need.”

I’m guessing once Apple releases its final preorder numbers, I’ll feel a tad better. All signs point to the fact that MILLIONS of others did the same exact thing.

My problem, one that I am certain I did not face alone, was this: I’m not due for an upgrade for quite some time.

Like many, I purchased the iPhone 4S the day it was released. In doing so, I signed a new two-year commitment.

That was 11 months ago.

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–>

It could make sense to leave for Sprint or Verizon, you say? Wrong.

The combined early termination fee of my contract with AT&T for my wife and me is well over $600. I did the math: I was screwed.

So I paid full price for two iPhone 5’s, with one eye open, at 6 a.m., in my boxers (my alarm never went off at 2:55. I now wait two weeks for shipping).

If you are/were in my position, would you have done the same?

IPhone 4S versus iPhone 5 – the features that matter

I wanted to break down the features that actually matter side by side. Not the specs, just the primary features of the phone that we use every single day.

There are plenty of articles comparing the iPhone 5 to its numerous Android and high-end smartphone “competitors.” This isn’t that.

I’m looking only at the iPhone 4S versus the iPhone 5.

It’s the phone I own and love, against the phone I just preordered. Here we go:

Battery

Consider: Battery Life

If I have a major complaint about my 4S, and every other iPhone I have owned, it is the battery life. I’ve gone through more Mophies than BlackBerry has users. Bottom line? This matters a lot to a lot of people. I could care less about talk time, which is what they always tout. I need to know how long the phone will last using major data.

  • iPhone 4S – Up to 6 hours on 3G, up to 9 hours on Wi-Fi
  • iPhone 5 – Up to 8 hours on 3G, up to 8 hours on LTE, up to 10 hours on Wi-Fi

Takeaway: Going from 6 hours to 8 hours when accessing cellular data works out to be a 33.3 percent increase in battery life for the 5 over the 4S. I would have loved if the new iPhone had the battery life of the iPad, but this is still a significant improvement.

Screen size

Consider: Screen Size

If there is one thing that can give me Android envy, it is screen size. That being said, I also see people with large-screen Android phones and think it is too much and looks goofy, like a phablet or something. Apple, for the first time, decided a larger screen made sense. It did it in a unique way. The screen on the 5 is “bigger” than the 4S. Longer may be a better description though.

  • iPhone 4S – 3.5-inch diagonal display
  • iPhone 5 – 4-inch diagonal display

Takeaway: Obviously Apple knows how to make larger screens work. Google “iPad market share” for proof. The additional space at the top and bottom of the iPhone 5 becomes most valuable in landscape mode, as now true 16:9 ratio is attainable. The additional row of apps and decreased need to scroll will be nice, but I am guessing not noticeable. The biggest winner here may be the mobile advertising world. More pixel equals more dollars, while obstructing the user experience less.

Camera

Consider: Camera

If there is an “app” that matters the most to me, it is the camera. My professional accomplishments, my Yorkie and the special moments I share privately with my family are all in my iPhone photo album. Photos matter more than ever. The iPhone 5 improves upon an already remarkable smartphone camera.

  • iPhone 4S – 8-megapixel sensor (3264 x 2448 pixel), backside illumination, hybrid infrared filter, and a f/2.4 aperture.
  • iPhone 5 – Sapphire crystal lens, dynamic low light mode, native Panorama mode, 8-megapixel sensor (3264 x 2448 pixel), backside illumination, hybrid infrared filter, and a f/2.4 aperture.

Takeaway: The lens (really important), amount of light the camera lets in (also really important) and Panorama mode (obviously cool) are what’s new. With the continued rise in popularity and mass adoption of photo apps, driven by Instagram, Camera+ and others, the improvements are welcome. Would I have liked to see more megapixels? Sure. I’m just glad Apple made an already amazing camera better. Had Apple left it untouched, I would not have been disappointed and still purchased the 5.

Speed

Consider: Speed

Speed, an unarguable critical daily component. My patience with websites and apps when on my iPhone is little to none. Hourglasses are for BlackBerrys. I want my phone to scream, whether I am connected to Wi-Fi or cellular.

  • iPhone 4S – A5 Apple built processor chip, 3G data connection
  • iPhone 5 – A6 Apple built processor chip, 4G LTE data connection

Takeaway: Going from the A5 chip in the iPhone 4S to the A6 chip in the iPhone 5 doubles both CPU and graphics processing speeds. I’ve never really used my iPhone 4S and thought it should be twice as fast as it is, but I’m thrilled it will be. As for the new data upgrade, consider this from the AP: “Sprint and Verizon iPhone users should see a huge jump in speed with the new iPhone because their 3G networks are relatively slow. Downloads will be more than 10 times faster where LTE is available. For AT&T users, downloads speeds should double or triple.”
Wow.

Sold yet? Thought so.

Features that matter, matter daily.

Introducing things like Facetime and Siri generate buzz and excitement. They can make it feel more “worth it” to upgrade.

Don’t be fooled.

Improved battery life, larger screen size, an upgraded camera and faster data/processing speeds are infinitely more important to a phone than being able to ask it for directions and get a clever answer.

via next.inman.com

S&P: Affordable housing issuance set to drop even as demand rises | Bedford Corners Homes

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Falling mortgage rates and tighter credit may force state housing finance agencies to issue even fewer mortgages to low-income borrowers this year, according to Standard & Poor’s research.

State HFAs finance the purchase of affordable housing as long as the rate on their debt is less than the mortgage rates the agencies charge. The downgrade of U.S. credit — by S&P — and other factors drove up the costs on state agency debt. At the same time, mortgage rates continue to plunge to new lows thanks to the Federal Reserve.

The return between their debt and rates is still positive, according to S&P, but thinning.

“The low rates on borrowed money have made the spreads increasingly thin, leaving the agencies with reduced profitability and diminished debt service coverage,” analysts said. (Click on the graph below to expand.)

Issuance of HFA multifamily bonds shifted above $200 billion in 2011, more than doubling from two years prior.

Before the downgrade of the U.S. debt, S&P rated more than half all affordable housing issuance AAA, but as of July, only 8% of these bonds hold the gilded rating, because of the agencies’ link to the U.S. rating.

The loans themselves perform better than the average mortgage, even though borrowers generally have lower FICO scores and a small, if any, down payment. The delinquency rate on HFA loans was roughly 6% in the third quarter, less than the average rate across the entire mortgage space.

Some are already looking to the secondary market to fund future affordable housing loans, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

“Some HFAs have also diversified somewhat and receive revenues from other sources, such as servicing fees,” S&P analysts said. “As long as interest rates remain low, agencies that can exercise these options will remain more strongly capitalized and, in our opinion, have stronger credit quality.”

via housingwire.com