Tricks to Take Great Hotel Photos Even If You Are Not a Photographer

You will agree that great photographs are inevitable for a hotel to inspire people to book their stay.

Fact:

Hotel photographs sell your place! They catch people’s atten­tion & make first impres­sion. They contain invit­ing moods and spark imagination.

You might also agree that the best option is to hire a profes­sion­al photog­ra­ph­er, but such services can be very pricey and some­times it is not easy to find a great one.

You might not be born a photog­ra­ph­er, but – there are a few TRICKS that could enor­mous­ly improve your own self-made hotel photos.

If you apply some of these tips your photos will look much better.

If that sounds inter­est­ing, let’s dive right in!

Every month the Trivago content team rejects hundreds of images submit­ted by hotel managers. Why? The photos fail to meet our quality stan­dards. Secondly, it may sound cruel, but no image can be less damag­ing than a bad image. Trivago website

A quick sum up of steps to amazing hotel photography

1. Buy, borrow or rent a good camera or phone.
2. Prepare your place – tidy, style, arrange.
3. Take into consid­er­a­tion your unique selling point (USP).
4. Be ready at the golden hours (early morning & dawn) on a bright day.
5. Take lots of photos in DRO or Auto HDR mode.
6. Use people in your photos.
7. Tell a story with your photos.
8. Do comput­er correc­tions.

Before we go deeper, let’s see a few exam­ples of great & bad hotel photography.

1. Buy, borrow or rent a good camera or phone

Phones

Dead serious, phones! You would be quite amazed at photog­ra­phy capa­bil­i­ties of the latest smart phones.

Like, the latest Huawei with Leica lens – the photos are wow.

And did you know you can use an exter­nal lens on smart­phones? How cool!

Cameras

Honestly, depend­ing on which camera you get, the cost of equip­ment can be as high as hiring a photog­ra­ph­er – but will be cheaper in a long run.

You will be able to use your camera anytime you make reno­va­tions or style changes of your prop­er­ty without an extra cost in the future.

And surely you upload photos to your hotel’s Instagram account or Facebook regu­lar­ly? Getting a good camera is an invest­ment with a great return, you can use it again and again.

But which one is the best?

Mid-range market cameras with inter­change­able lenses would be a good compro­mise between price and quality.

Avoid low-end compact cameras, for sure.

Go for pricier high-end cameras if you have the budget.

Additionally, you need to get a good lens for all these cameras.

Zoom lenses would be a good choice as you can take both land­scape and close-up images with just 1 lens, as opposed to prime lenses (which can not zoom).

There are hundreds of lenses on the market, choos­ing one depends on your budget. Don’t go for the cheap­est ones. Reading product reviews of other lens buyers is very helpful.

Some cool cameras are:

• Canon EOS 1100 D.
• Nikon D3300 (begin­ner level, around $400) or Nikon 3400 (also begin­ner level, around $500).
• Nikon D7200 (mid-range, around $1300).
• Canon EOS Rebel T5i (good for videos, around $600)
• Olympus OM‑D E‑M10 Mark II (around $650).
• Sony A7 models – they are seri­ous­ly GREAT, we tried! (Sony A7 – around $1100 for a body with 28 – 70 mm zoom lens, a good combi­na­tion for prop­er­ty photog­ra­phy. Or the latest models: Sony A7II R and S, Sony A7III /around $2500 & $2700/ or Sony A9 /this one might be a blow to one’s budget, price of $4500/).

The first 4 cameras are the ‘old good’ DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) cameras, the latter ones (Olympus and Sony) cameras are the ‘latest hit’ MILC (mirror­less inter­change­able lens) cameras. This article discuss­es differ­ences between the 2.

A good tip: Sony A7IIS is special­ly tweaked for videog­ra­phy – you might find it very handy if you like to make videos of your prop­er­ty for Youtube etc. A superb thing to do!

2. Prepare your place – tidy, arrange, style

Arrange & style

Seriously, this could be the most impor­tant step in your hotel photography.

Styling is a form of art that creates the person­al­i­ty of a hotel.

What is gonna be in the photo must look good. No photo editing program will help you with badly styled room.

Slightly rearrange furni­ture, set chairs nicely around a table, open/close windows, fix curtains, posi­tion artwork, place ameni­ties, unclut­ter rooms – these do wonders for photos.

Beware, the prop­er­ty and rooms should look about the same way in the photographs as they do in reality. Move furni­ture too much, add things that will not be in the room when guests arrive – and leave your guests feeling deceived.

Very impor­tant part of styling rooms is select­ing the right colors that create harmony and mood.

Let’s discuss color harmony a bit more.

A visu­al­ly appeal­ing, well designed room is based on harmony and balance of color.

Color harmony

Harmony is some­thing that is pleas­ing to the eye. It engages the viewer and it creates an inner sense of order, a balance in the visual experience.

You might know the desired effect of match­ing colors can create very differ­ent settings: a relax­ing, luxu­ri­ous, roman­tic, uplift­ing or ener­gized room..

Unfortunately, a room created without color harmony in mind can give away a feeling of chaos, cheap­ness, disor­der, bad taste and can influ­ence the guest’s deci­sion to book – in a nega­tive way.

The human brain rejects what it can not orga­nize, what it can not under­stand. The visual task requires that we present a logical struc­ture. Color harmony deliv­ers visual inter­est and a sense of order.

Therefore, before you start taking photographs of your rooms, double check if they have the right color balance.

Luckily, to get color harmony right is not hard.

If you are not natu­ral­ly gifted in combin­ing colors, use tools and guides to help you, in a paper or digital form. Such as color wheels (the colors of the visible spec­trum arranged into a circle) that help estab­lish harmo­nious color sets.

These online palette gener­a­tors are at your service for free and it is fun to use them:

• Adobe Color CC
• Coolors
• Paletton

More than one color in a room can look great, but keep it to three colors maximum. If you choose two bold colors, the third should be a neutral color – to give the eyes a break.

Check out this nice article: learn the basics of color theory to know what looks good.

And sure you know about the beau­ti­ful classic neutral palette that includes only colors not found on the color wheel – such as beige, brown, gray, ivory, taupe, black and white?

We could say these are hues that appear to be without color or have very little satu­ra­tion. These colors are a crit­i­cal compo­nent of great design. They are visu­al­ly relax­ing and restful and they work well with any deco­rat­ing style.

This article explains why neutral colors are the best.

Pantone company sells great paper color guides and has a handy phone appli­ca­tion Pantone Studio with a 7‑day free trial.

In addi­tion to color schemes, 60−30−10 rule for using colors says that for the most balanced, appeal­ing look you shall deco­rate with one domi­nant color the major­i­ty of the space (60 %), with another, secondary contrast color that fills roughly half as much space as the domi­nant color (30 %) and a third accent color (10 %).

For those who use Pinterest, we compiled a collec­tion beau­ti­ful use of colors in inte­ri­or design of mostly inte­ri­or photos with great color schemes that might inspire.

3. Take into consideration your unique selling point (USP)

You are the person who knows best why your prop­er­ty is unique and why your guests would choose you over someone else.

Highlight this unique­ness in your photos. Show your website visi­tors the bene­fits of staying at your place. Bring all the awesome things about your hotel out to them.

4. Be ready at the golden hours (early morning & dawn) on a bright day – ALIAS importance of light & mood!

Are you an early riser?

Good news for you!

Early morning (and late afternoon/early evening) are the times to take your photos!

Called the golden hour – a period shortly after sunrise or before sunset during which daylight is redder and softer than when the sun is higher in the sky.

You bet, the golden hour will make your hotel photos MAGICAL!

Even this article says so: how to make your photos magical.

Golden light shows up during golden hour, which is an hour after sunrise, and an hour before sunset. These aren’t exact times though, since it depends on where in the world you live! You might get more or less time for golden hour. Photography Concentrate

Just stop taking pictures on a grey cloudy day – they will be dull, color­less and boring.

Include evening pics and show a cosy atmos­phere created by your light­ing, guests can picture them­selves sitting at your veranda enjoy­ing their dinner or the roman­tic sunset views.

Importance of light

There would be no photog­ra­phy without light. After all, the word photog­ra­phy comes from the Greek ‘fotos’ (light) and ‘grafi’ (write, draw) – togeth­er meaning ‘writing with light’.

Having enough light is vital for taking great photos, even more so in room photog­ra­phy, that’s why it is impor­tant to catch the moment when the highest amount of natural light comes into the room through the doors and windows.

Therefore your main concern at a photo shoot is to ensure there is as much light as possi­ble avail­able by choos­ing the right day, the right time of the day, and if natural light isn’t enough, to bring in arti­fi­cial lights to help you.

Lamps, flash lights, photo lights – all you can find, bring it in!

Of all the crucial factors in photog­ra­phy, nothing is more impor­tant than light. Without light (whether natural or arti­fi­cial) there is no photograph!

Find ways to discreet­ly place addi­tion­al light sources to illu­mi­nate dark spots, shadowy places and corners.

This video by photog­ra­ph­er Noah Fallis is inter­est­ing. He is about to take photos of a hotel room and he smartly installed (hid) photo lights in several places. The equip­ment will not be visible in the photo but its light will bright­en up the shadows. Notice that the room already has a lot of natural light coming from huge windows. And yet, extra lights are still used!

5. Take lots of photos of everything including details – in DRO or Auto HDR mode

Find DRO or Auto HDR setting in your camera or phone and shoot in this mode.

DRO stands for dynamic range opti­miza­tion, HDR for a high dynamic range.

Both func­tions improve the overall expo­sure, they bring out more details into both dark areas and bright areas.

This is espe­cial­ly useful in one partic­u­lar moment when taking images of rooms becomes diffi­cult – it is when there are strong value differ­ences between the lit and shadowy areas of the room – i.e. a dark room and a bright window.

The result­ing images can then be either over exposed or under exposed. DRO and HDR help to improve this.

Gary Fong shares how he takes HDR photos in his video with Sony A7 camera.

Take the best quality images your camera allows you to take – the biggest size, the best format – to have the best mate­r­i­al to work with after­wards – you will resize your images to a smaller size for the web use later.

Using a tripod will help you set up your shot, ensure your images are not blurred and is a must to take images in a darker envi­ron­ment when the shutter of the camera needs to stay open for longer exposures.

If your camera has a hot-shoe on the top, you can attach an exter­nal flash – you can direct/bend this flash towards the walls or ceiling – the light then bounces off and helps make a room brighter.

You wonder why is it best not to use the flash that is on the camera itself (built-in flash)?

This flash fires light direct­ly into the room (into the open space, there­fore the light doesn’t bounce) and can create stark shadows or glare of the more reflec­tive objects in the room.

Knowledge of some of the rules of photo­graph­ic compo­si­tion is not neces­sary – just helpful.

You could have a quick look at just one of them that might help make your photos more inter­est­ing – the rule of thirds.

This rule is about divid­ing your image into nine equal sections by a set of two verti­cal and two hori­zon­tal lines.

With the imag­i­nary frame in place, you should place the most impor­tant element(s) in your shot on one of the lines or where the lines meet (see image below).

Cameras are smart – they will help you use this rule – there is an option in most cameras to switch on a viewfind­er helper grid.

NOW LET’S FINALLY GET TO WORK!

Take photos of your rooms, bath­rooms, recep­tion, gardens, balcony views, swim­ming pools, dining rooms, confer­ence rooms!

Take wide views.

And include mean­ing­ful details that are of impor­tance to the guests, too.

6. Use people in your photos

It is great when a hotel uses people in their photos.

This way, guests can relate and imagine how they would feel staying at that place.

Pleasantly looking guests enjoy­ing their stay – if you include them in your photos, your images will stand out and your place will look alive!

And if none – people should appear at least in your recep­tion photos so guests feel there is someone to take care of them and your place is alive.

Remember, people with recog­niz­able faces in your hotel photographs must give their consent to be in the images.

7. Tell a story with your photos

This one is big!

Not just showing your place’s photos but telling a simple story will lift the quality of your pics and tempt guests to book with you.

You can achieve this very simply!

Throw a few addi­tions to the scene – person­al items in the room, a nice robe over the bed,  bottle of chilled wine and glasses, a piece of luggage, jewellery on a table, an open book, wedding flower bouquet, wedding dress hanging on the door, people, cute animals.

Use your imagination!

Breathe life into your photos and change the boring prop­er­ty images into pictures that inspire to take a trip to your place.