5 AIRBNB PHOTO MISTAKES
Here are the five newbie mistakes that you're making when taking photos of your Airbnb property. If you'rehiring a professional, they might make one or two of these as well so watch. In this section, you will learn what you should not be doing when taking photos of your Airbnb property. These tips will help you make a lot more money because 6 out of 10 guests that travel on Airbnb only look at the phots! If you're not taking great photos, you're actually losing money. Guests are not booking your place because someone else has better photos than you it's just that simple.
Do not use vertical photos on AirBnb
These tips start with some basics, but you know there's some things that even professionals sometimes skip or get wrong. Number one just this is very much Airbnb specific it's the vertical photo. I’ve actually seen a lot of hosts do this where especially with the bathroom because bathrooms are small. They'll take a vertical photo. The problem is that Airbnb has an algorithm. In the algorithm as they choose who lives and who dies like who gets to have like high ranking on their platform. If you have vertical photos you're discounted onAirbnb. You’re no longer as attractive to Airbnb because to optimize their shopper experience or their user experience, they want horizontal photos. If you're taking vertical phone photos you're actually losing out.Here's a tip for you (even android phones have this) go to panoramic. If you can see that and when you take a photo would like you want to shoot a photo of like the bathroom instead start in a corner and just pano the bathroom like that. Basically now I just took a panophoto without even looking at the screen how cool is that? What you're doing is you're going from mirror through the toilet through the shower to the other wall andI just created a horizontal photo while my phone was vertical. That’s how you take a panophoto and that'll prevent you from taking unnecessarily vertical photos and thus ruining your performance with Airbnb's ranking system due to vertical photos.
Keep all of your photos the same level
Even if you're taking your photos horizontally a lot of people with phones or camera phones or even thephone you're using right now they do something called the tilt. They'll take a photo like that and so now when you list the photo on Airbnb in true horizontal. Look at that. That's at an angle right. This was the true angle the phone was at before I took it but now this is where it is so this is just jarring to user experience: you want to make uniformity with all of your photos. They should always be completely level. Congruence is going to be super important because you want your experience when people review your photos to be as pleasant as possible. If you have some photos that are at a weird tilty angle just because you're trying to get extra furniture in the shot and stuff like that it's going to create more of a jarring experience. Make sure that they'reall completely level. Professional photographers don't screw that up but they screw some other stuff up.
Not composing your photos
number three the mistake that a lot of you are making and even intermediate like photographers are making because you don't understand the compositional aspects of like real estate photography is you're taking pictures of stuff. No! You want to compose a photo. Let me just show you some photos of well-composed rooms. You’re not taking a photo of something in the room you're taking a photo of the room. That is really the key here: you want to compose the whole photo. You're going to use the whole screen to show a couch and a wall in the tv and the curtains and all the goodies right you're not taking a photo of the couch. You’re not taking a photo of the armchair where it's in the center of the photo because you're trying to draw attention to that thing. Let the camera do its work and create a good composed even photo. That will help with this whole not jarring the person because compositionally speaking, looking at a whole room and then letting the eye wander throughout the photo and take the whole photo in is much better than individual phots of a couch, then the armchair. It's kind of a really weird thing but even Katherine my first manager that I ever hired it took a little while to get out of this mindset. I’ve said to her, “hey let me take a photo of these things now you can take photos of stuff but you still want to compose that.” When you’re setting up a coffee station well, you're taking a photo of your coffee station but you're like setting up your coffee and your decaf and everythingyou've got your coffee machine maker and the counter and stuff you still try to compose it so like the lines are good and square in the photo and you just have this good full photo that's just focused on your coffee station.If you take a photo of your kitchen with the pots and pans on the stove which is a tip that I had for you guys in a previous photography video you want to actually like stage your kitchen you still want to take like a dead-onlike level photo with the stove in it so the pots and pans are there and the counter line is nice and smooth youstill want to compose that even though you're trying to take a photo per se of the stove top that is the primary focus of the photo but you want to make sure you don't forget about the composition of the photo. Just because your point is to take a photo of something so taking pictures of stuff actually creates bad photos.
Be aware of lighting in your photos
Number four is lighting be mindful of uneven or under lit rooms. Iphones are cool because they've got a really cool software that helps like boost up the amount of light that it gets in its very small lens. If your room's a little under lit even your iphone can do a good job and cameras like the one I’m shooting on it can just sit on the tripod and take in light a little extra long. Even like in a really dark room or my camera I can take a picture of the night sky and get stars for example. Cameras can like manually suck in a lot of light, that's something that professional photo photography cameras can do, but the problem is uneven lighting. What will happen isif you've got a lot of window light where the sun's just beaming in and you don't really have any good interiorlight then it's kind of hard to get that right shot where you can actually take a photo of the inside of the home really well depicted without having this window just blast in so much white light. That it creates a haze across the photo and looks really bad. A lot of professionals do something called bracketing where they take three or five different photos where the photo takes like a little bit of light in and then it does another one where ittakes some light in and then it takes another photo where it takes a lot of light in and then they mash those photos up into what's called a high dynamic range photo. I teach this in my course and how to use photoshop to get it done you can even do it with your iphone. High dynamic range photos are really good for making sure that your uneven lighting is handled. I’ve got these two light boxes over here that that's casting light on me right now and you can actually kind of tell be based on the shadow of my hand. I’ve got light sources. Artificial light is your friend when you take photos. Even if you're using an iphone just cast a bunch of light from behind you just have a light box over each shoulder pointing to different sides of the room and then take a photo after flooding all the light. Even lighting is so important that way your camera doesn't have to do so much work.
What you want to do is you want to be able to pick a good level of exposure and then take in all the light and just have everything look good. Uneven lighting or harsh lighting is your worst enemy when takingprofessional looking photos.
Under shooting the number of photos needed
Under shooting now a lot of professionals get this wrong too because they're in a hurry and they hate their job apparently or something like that but there's no such thing as overshooting. You can never get too many shots unless you run out of film but since we're using electronic like devices most times you have so much room for all of the photos and you should overshoot or get as much coverage as possible. I’m in Philadelphiaright now so let me shout out to my boy hui who's a professional photographer does real estate tagging his Instagram somewhere find it in the description highlight reel wham-o hui. What he'll do is he'll take a shot and then he'll move over to like a corner so he'll do like a corner he'll do the center of the room he'll do another corner and he basically tries to take a shot in order to kind of encompass a full 360 degree of the room. Younever know what's going to look the best you know once you get out of the editing room so he does his best to try to get these establishing wide shots that gets the whole room but he tries to get the whole room fromlike every prominent angle and then he'll try to work into the details and take detail shots so like if you're you know ottoman coffee table. It has like a really cool view right from the couch towards the tv and there's some really good artwork he might take a perspective shot across the ottoman or across the coffee table. That's like a detailed shot he'd pick up or maybe he wants to get an artistic shot where he's like there's a mirror on the wall so he takes a shot where stuff is reflecting off the mirror like he'll do all that good stuff too so those creative shots will come in after you do all of your establishing shots but shoot a lot of these really wide establishing shots from every perceivable angle. Another tip is shoot it at about waist height we're talking or about three feet off the ground and tilt it very slightly up or even across the floor.
I like imagining my favorite is maybe five to ten degrees up if you're taking your photo like you're going to tip itup now. The reason why is it's like imagine like you're looking around a room when you're like seven years old and you're short everything just looks so much bigger. By shooting at three feet high and tilting towards the ceiling just a little bit you're creating a much perceivably larger space a lot of people this is I guess tip number six is a lot of people shoot down right they shoot at chest length and they shoot down a little bit because they want to make sure that they're getting the furniture in the shot right well when you're six foot tall or seven feet tall some of you like you're shooting from six feet up and all the furniture is two and a half feet off the ground naturally your phone's going to be at a downward angle to try to get all the like stuff right that's the problem. Now the room looks small because if you're looking down at everything you're bigger than the room it's perspective.
Get your phone down at your belt buckle, tip it up a little bit, and shoot up into the room. The way your lensworks your lens is catching light at all this different angle so from belt buckle level or lower you're still getting all of your furniture while getting a little bit of floor and you're also getting some ceiling in the shot too.
Choose the right angle
Choose the right angle and that helps with that composition that we talked about earlier. Get a lot of shotsbecause you don't know which ones are going to be your favorite. Get those establishing ones get the artistic shots, the little things.
Take photos of everything
Take photos of everything because if you don't show it they won't know it. You can talk about things in thedescription but like we talked about six out of every ten guests just flip through the photo reel. If you have a hot tub you're going to need to take a photo of the hot tub. If you got a killer coffee station you want to photo the coffee station. If you've Disney plus on your thing or you just like rented mortal kombat because it came out today and you want everybody to know they can watch mortal kombat take a photo of it of the loading screen for mortal kombat and put it on your photo reel. There's nothing wrong with that take a photo of everything that is cool about your place and put it in your photo reel. You need at least eight photos minim inorder to qualify for Airbnb's regular photo seo boost. But after that, you don't really get any benefits for having 50 photos instead of 30. You want to have at least eight photos, so even if you have a little studio go out into the city and find cool stuff that's nearby your studio. If you don't have enough photos for, example, but if they don't know it it's because you didn't show it. Which means they may not know that you're next to the rocky steps here in Philadelphia unless you post a photo of the rocky steps. Photos are the most important part of your listing even more so than reviews can you believe it.
