Carr Avenue in Leiston is a street of houses that look like each other. Red brick, timber gables, bay windows, arched porches, all built at roughly the same time by roughly the same hands. The one I was photographing has its gable picked out in blue. Its neighbour has the same detail in green. When a house sits on a street like that, the front elevation has one job in a listing photograph, which is to say clearly that this is the one, and to say it before anybody has read a word of the description.
The fourth property for ML Short Stays
This is the fourth house I have photographed for ML Short Stays and the second in a few weeks. They run serviced accommodation across the UK and have been doing it since 2021, with a cluster of properties around this part of Suffolk aimed at people working on the Sizewell C project. Leiston sits closer to the site than anywhere else they let, which makes it about as convenient a base as a contractor is going to find. The photographs were made for the Airbnb listing, which goes live shortly.
Who does what
ML Short Stays staged the house themselves. The beds were made, the towels were out, the pictures were on the walls and the rooms were dressed before I arrived. That is not always how it goes, and it makes a real difference. My job was to show the house in the best light it could honestly be shown in, which is a different task from making it look like somewhere it is not.
I make that distinction because it matters to how the pictures perform. A listing photograph that oversells creates a guest who arrives disappointed, and a disappointed guest writes the review that costs you the next ten bookings. The job is to make the house look like itself on its best day, with the light working for it and the rooms shown at their true proportions. Get that right and expectations match reality when the key comes out of the lockbox.
The hardest frame in the house
There is one photograph taken from the hallway, looking past the utility room and through into the dining room at the back, with the garden showing through the windows beyond. Four distinct spaces in one frame, each lit by something different. The hall is dim. The utility has a ceiling light and a small window. The dining room is full of daylight from windows on two sides. Outside, it was a bright afternoon.
From the darkest corner of that hallway to the sunlit greenery outside is something like five stops of brightness. A camera set to hold the garden turns the hall into a black hole. Set to hold the hall, the garden burns out to a white blank and the dining room goes with it. Neither version tells you anything useful about the house.
The answer is to photograph the scene more than once at different exposures and combine them, which is what the letters HDR in some of these filenames mean. Done badly it produces that 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 single frame does more to explain the layout than three separate room shots would.
The fireplace, and what to do with the good bits
The sitting room 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 house and the sort of thing that has been ripped out of a great many properties like this one. Somebody here had the sense to keep it.
Features like that are worth photographing properly rather than letting them sit in the corner of a wider shot. The room was staged with a round mirror above it and framed prints on the adjacent wall, which gives the eye a route around the space. My part was to light it so the black iron kept its detail instead of filling in to a shape, and so the tiles read as green and cream rather than as a smudge. Cast iron is difficult. It wants to go either sooty black or shiny grey, and neither looks like the thing in front of you.
Small rooms told honestly
Not every room in a house of this age is generous. One of the bedrooms is small, with a sash window that looks onto the brick wall of next door and an open clothes rail rather than a fitted wardrobe. There is a way of photographing a room like that from the far corner with a very wide lens, which makes it look twice the size and guarantees a complaint on arrival.
I photographed it as it is. Bed, window, storage, door out to the landing, at a focal length that keeps the proportions truthful. A contractor booking three months of accommodation would far rather know what they are getting than be flattered into it. The house has three bedrooms and they are not all the same, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as the pictures say so.
The back of the house in August
The rear elevation and garden were photographed on a bright afternoon at the end of a dry spell, with a good deal of cloud moving through. Suffolk in August does what it does to a lawn. Rather than fight it, I waited for the sky to be worth having and used it, so the frame is carried by the cloud and the shape of the house rather than by the grass. Working with the weather you have got is most of outdoor photography, and standing about waiting twenty minutes for the right cloud costs nothing.
Working with ML Short Stays
They are a good company to deal with. Professional, organised, clear about what they need, and they have the property ready when they say it will be ready. Four jobs in and it has been the same every time. That sounds like a small thing. Anyone who has turned up to photograph a property that was not ready will know that it is not.
Property photography in Leiston and across Suffolk
I photograph properties for serviced accommodation operators, holiday let owners, letting agents and estate agents across Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. That covers interiors, exteriors and the sort of coverage a listing needs to work on Airbnb, Booking.com or an agent’s own website. My rates for interior and exterior property photography are on the property photography rates page.
Leiston is about twenty five minutes from my studio at Base Business Park in Rendlesham, near Woodbridge, on the old RAF Bentwaters site. I work regularly across Leiston, Saxmundham, Aldeburgh, Southwold, Woodbridge and the wider Sizewell area. If you have a property that needs photographing, tell me what it is, where it is and where the pictures are going, and I will tell you what it takes.
More on how I approach holiday let photography in Suffolk, including how I light and edit these properties.