C’mon, bad photos, strange design features, no decorating skill and no real description are one thing, but taking photos without even bothering to clean the place up, is a whole other level of clueless. Sure, maybe he’s a personally nice guy, and needs the money but he doesn’t get it at all.
3 Likes
I don’t have a background in architectural photography, so I just played around with angles until I found what I thought worked, and tried to emulate what I saw in architecture and design magazines. And I worked from some basic principles:
- People like symmetry and straight lines. (I spent a lot of time straightening lines and I found it quite hard to photograph my small bathroom without curving lines of distortion so I ended up taking two vertical photos and placing them side by side.)
- Contrast makes things pop, but you don’t want to use so much that you lose important details.
- People like light, and balanced light. Phones now have tools that make it easy to adjust this for white walls.
- I tend to boost the saturation just a tiny smidge (in fact, in my iPhone tools, I boost what they call “vibrance” rather than saturation) to make colours pop, because my home is very colourful and I wanted to emphasise that as a selling point in a sea of Hamptons-style beachy beiges and greys. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Hamptons style, but that’s the majority of what’s on offer in my area so we’re trying to stand out as different.)
- One thing I’ve been meaning to do is get some photos at that perfect time of day in the evening when the light levels are exactly the same inside and out, but different colours, so the outside light is purplish and the inside light is yellowish and somehow they look just perfect together. Maybe I’ll get around to that tonight!
- Some things just work better as vertical (portrait) orientation, which Airbnb doesn’t handle well, so I stitched together vertical photos using Pine Tools (I highly recommend this – it is free, intuitive to use, and always gave me good results).
- And then through trial and error I found some things that were unexpected – like the fact that the pictures tended to work better if I took pictures from about waist height.
But I would love to do some reading because I’m sure there’s more I can learn, so @Tranquility_Base (and anyone else!), if you found any really good online source that talks about principles of interior photography that you would recommend, please share here!
Maybe we can have this be a photo thread where we show what angles / photo strategies do and don’t work in our spaces?
3 Likes
I wish I had bookmarked it, and I can’t even remember where the listing was, but there was a beautiful place that was sort of medieval looking inside, with heavy dark antique-looking furniture, and even though most of their photos were taken with no natural light, and they were definitely on the dark side, they were stunning, with jewel-like colors in their decor. The photos weren’t gimmicky at all, no wide angle shots or anything, but whoever took those photos made the place look like a renaissance painting that you wanted to sink into.
3 Likes
Sometimes I see listing photos where I just want to go over there and move the bed a foot and a half over so it’s centered under the window, instead of the bed being not centered under it for no apparent reason- there seems to be adequate space in the room to do so.
I just saw a listing yesterday, nice studio guest house for 2, lots of natural light, nice furnishings, good color combos, eclectic but uncluttered, cute little kitchenette. The photos were fine, but her furniture arrangement made no sense to me. She had the eating table over near the bed, (which was uncentered on the window behind it), instead of near the kitchenette, with the couch on that side of the room, too, and the armchair pushed back into a corner, nowhere near the couch.
I would have moved the armchair over near the couch, to create a little cozy seating area, and the table over to the corner where the chair was, and centered the bed.
Thanks for that tip- I will check it out. I like the sound of “intuitive”, as I’m no techie or pro photographer. It’s almost impossible to take horizontal shots of my guest room and bathroom, as they are small, with no space to stand back far enough, and there are high, arched, brick ceilings, which are a feature I want in the photo. Vertical shots also give a more accurate representation of how this particular space actually feels when you are in it.
3 Likes
Yes! Some things just need to be photographed in portrait orientation or they lose something. Like here, I wanted to show the ceiling fan and I couldn’t get a good photo of the room in landscape orientation that included the ceiling fan because it would end up leaving just a tiny triangle of colourful carpet in the bottom of the image that looked odd. Since it worked better as a vertical shot, I paired that with a close-up of the armchair and flower arrangement:
If you use PineTools to merge images (Merge images online), be sure to increase thickness of border – its default setting is a border of 0 but when you’re putting 2 pictures side by side, it can look quite odd if you don’t have a border between the photos. I tend to choose a 10-15 pixel border but you can play around with different widths to see what works for you
3 Likes
i love what you’ve done here (and I think i mentioned that previously) and it’s really on trend right now in real estate photography. Finally! it look so long for some artiness to seep into real estate photography.
3 Likes
I agree… If you are local, maybe you can help him out with photography. Then you have a local host friend who can help you with something else when you need it.
I have needed a lot of unexpected help, and it’s great to have a local with whom you can trade favors.
2 Likes
I don’t advertise an ocean view, but we have one that is about like this guys. This is what I say on the picture where we used a telephoto lens to capture our “peek-a-boo” view:
(if you can’t read it on the picture: “If you have some very good binoculars or a telephoto lens and the monkeypod trees have been freshly trimmed, you can see the WWM and McGregor Point lighthouse from the lanai”)
2 Likes
Aww that’s kind of you, Gillian – but I’m just a good copycat, emulating what I see other photographers doing. Always keen to learn more and I love looking at what other Airbnb hosts like you are doing, it’s always inspiring!
1 Like
That is very funny – humour like this I think goes a long way toward managing expectations and giving guests a positive interpretation of a home’s limitations
2 Likes
Is it possible – knowing that there is a shortage of places – he is deliberately filtering out guests who might be inclined to be picky complainers and who… how can I put this?.. actually give a shit about anything except PAR-TAY! ?
1 Like
Whilst your attitude is lovely, full of empathy and kindness, how does that actually help him to succeed ? If he’s lurking he’s now learning how to be a better host, and that benefits him. We are actually helping him, whereas #kindnessmatters actually hinders him. We aren’t lobbing personal attacks at the guy.
1 Like