Holiday Let and Airbnb Photography in Suffolk
Interiors, exteriors and gardens for holiday cottages, Airbnb properties and serviced accommodation across Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire.
Your photographs are the listing. Someone scrolling Airbnb on a phone gives a property about a second before they tap or keep going, and that decision gets made on one image at thumbnail size. The description, the reviews and the nightly rate only get read if the picture earns the tap first.
I photograph holiday lets, self-catering cottages, Airbnb properties and serviced accommodation across Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. Interiors, exteriors and gardens, shot for booking platforms rather than for a brochure that nobody reads on a phone.
Most of the houses I have photographed recently have been holiday lets, and shooting them has taught me things that estate agency work never did.
Holiday lets need different pictures from houses for sale
Estate agency photography exists to get the viewing booked. The buyer will walk through the rooms themselves and form their own opinion, so the pictures only need to be accurate and inviting enough to get them through the door.
A holiday let never gets that viewing. The guest books from the photographs, arrives, and either finds what the pictures promised or does not. That gap is where bad reviews come from, and a bad review costs more than the shoot did.
So I shoot lets to be honest about size, light and layout. Rooms at their true proportions, verticals straight, and enough of each room in frame that a guest can work out where the bed sits in relation to the window. If a bedroom is small, the photograph should still make it look like somewhere you would happily sleep, without pretending it is twice the size.
Holding the light from the darkest corner to the garden
The technical problem in almost every interior is the same. The window is many times brighter than the room. Expose for the room and the window burns out to white. Expose for the window and the room goes dark.
In a period house in Leiston I photographed recently there is one frame taken from the hallway, looking past the utility room and through into the dining room, with the garden showing through the windows beyond. Four spaces in one shot, each lit by something different, and something like five stops of brightness between the darkest corner of the hall and the sunlit greenery outside. A camera set to hold the garden turns the hall into a black hole. Set to hold the hall, the garden burns out and takes the dining room with it. Neither version tells a guest anything useful.
The answer is to photograph the scene more than once at different exposures and combine them. Done badly it produces the grey, flat, slightly unreal look that gives the technique a poor name. Done properly, nobody notices anything except that they can see the whole house at once, from the front door through to the garden, the way your eye would see it standing there. That one frame explained the layout better than three separate room shots would have.
This is how I light and edit every property now. It takes longer than pointing a camera at the corner of a room, and it is the difference between a listing that looks professional and one that looks like a phone snap.
Photographing the good bits properly
That same house has an original cast iron fireplace with a tiled slip down each side, a green vine pattern on cream. It is the best single feature in the property and the sort of thing that has been ripped out of a great many houses like it.
Features like that are worth lighting on their own rather than leaving in the corner of a wider shot. Cast iron is difficult. It wants to go either sooty black or shiny grey, and neither looks like the thing in front of you. Getting the black to keep its detail and the tiles to read as green and cream is a few minutes of work that gives a guest a reason to choose your property over the identical one down the road.
Shooting for the crop
Booking platforms do not show your photographs the way you upload them. Airbnb crops the first image to a wide banner, Booking.com frames differently again, and an agent’s own website will do something else entirely. The same picture appears as a small square in search results and full width on the listing page.
I frame with that in mind, so the important part of the room survives every crop. It costs nothing at the time of the shoot and it saves you discovering later that the platform has sliced the top off your beams.
A new listing with no reviews
A property going live for the first time has no reviews, no ratings and no history. The photographs are carrying the whole thing alone.
I photographed a three bedroom contractor house in Saxmundham for ML Short Stays in exactly that position. With nothing else on the page to reassure anyone, the images had to do the work of proving the property was clean, well kept and genuinely as described. That shapes the shot list: more coverage, fewer artistic angles, and a clear run through the property so a guest can picture the whole stay rather than four nice corners.
Small rooms told honestly
Not every room in an older house is generous. One of the bedrooms in the Leiston house is small, with a sash window looking onto the brick wall next door and an open clothes rail instead of a fitted wardrobe.
There is a way of photographing a room like that from the far corner with a very wide lens. It makes the room look twice the size and it guarantees a complaint on arrival. I photographed it as it is, at a focal length that keeps the proportions truthful. Someone booking three months of accommodation would far rather know what they are getting than be flattered into it, and a property can have three bedrooms that are not all the same without that being a problem, as long as the pictures say so.
Getting the property ready
The shoot goes better when the property is ready before I arrive. Nothing here is complicated.
- Beds made properly, with the bedding you actually want photographed
- Surfaces cleared of cleaning products, chargers, remote controls and leaflets
- Bins out of shot, toilet seats down, towels folded or hung neatly
- Curtains and blinds fully open unless the view is a problem
- All bulbs working and matching in colour where possible
- Cars moved off the drive and bins moved off the frontage for the exteriors
- Garden furniture set out if guests will use it
If the property is being changed over between guests, I can work around the cleaner, though it is easier for everyone if the shoot happens after the changeover rather than during it.
There is a fuller room-by-room version of this, covering holiday lets and houses going on the market, on my what to do before a property photographer arrives page.
Timing and the seasons
Gardens, frontages and anything involving the sea look very different in February and June. If the exteriors matter, and for a coastal let they usually do, it is worth booking the shoot for a time of year that matches the season you are selling.
Most owners want new photographs in place before the spring and summer booking season opens, which means shooting earlier than feels necessary. I would rather say that now than have you book in July for photographs you needed in March.
Weather on the day matters less than people expect. A Suffolk lawn at the end of a dry August is never going to look like May, so rather than fight it I let the sky carry the frame and wait for the cloud to be worth having. Standing about for twenty minutes to get that costs nothing and it is usually the difference in the exterior shot.
From the Leiston shoot
Where I work
My studio is at Bentwaters, near Woodbridge, so the Suffolk coast is close. I regularly photograph properties in Leiston, Saxmundham, Lowestoft, Aldeburgh, Thorpeness, Southwold, Walberswick, Orford, Framlingham, Woodbridge and Felixstowe, and I cover Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire as well.
If you have several properties in the same area, they are usually more efficient to photograph on the same day.
Recent holiday let work
- A period house on Carr Avenue in Leiston for ML Short Stays, photographed for an Airbnb listing near Sizewell C
- A three bedroom contractor house in Saxmundham for ML Short Stays, shot for a new listing with no reviews to lean on
- A refurbished holiday let in Leiston for Taylor Swann Property Ltd
- Two five bedroom short let houses in Lowestoft and Leiston, compared side by side
What it costs
Property photography is priced by the size of the property rather than by the hour or by the image.
1 to 2 bedrooms
£90
Interior and exterior included
3 to 4 bedrooms
£135
Interior and exterior included
5 bedrooms or more
£180
Interior and exterior included
- There is no booking fee on property work. The rate above is the rate.
- Mileage is charged at £0.60 per mile from Bentwaters, Suffolk.
- Several properties in the same area can usually be photographed on the same day, which keeps the mileage down.
- The number of images depends on the property. I would rather supply the right coverage than a fixed number that leaves a room out.
- Images are released once the invoice has been paid in full.
Full details are on the property photography rates page.
Holiday let photography
Tell me about your property
Send me the address, the number of bedrooms and when you need the images live, and I will confirm the rate and availability. If you are not sure whether the property is ready to photograph, send a few phone pictures and I will tell you honestly.