How I Shot It: Five Steps for a Foolproof Airbnb Shoot

In the share economy, more and more people are finding their side hustle in the form of renting out extra rooms or vacation homes through services like VRBO and Airbnb. Earlier this month, I did a quick and easy property shoot for one such hopeful side hustler. Using a minimal photo kit and about an hour of editing, I created a nice set of images, sure to help them get bookings. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Gear and Settings

Start with a wide-angle lens and mount your camera on a tripod just above waist height for the cleanest lines and best perspective. Shoot in the 10mm to 24mm range; anything wider gets too distorted and screams: “I’m a walk-in closet pretending to be an apartment,” while anything narrower will fail to get full room shots. Ideally, the property will look spacious while maintaining a realistic sense of scale.

Set your aperture to somewhere in the f/8 to f/16 range. Set your ISO as low as it can go: there’s no need to risk noise when you’re shooting on a tripod. Let the shutter speed be what it will be. Again, tripod.

Step 2: Bracket

For all of your room shots, take three or more exposures. I shoot three images about a stop apart each (-1, 0, +1). Some people like five or seven-shot bracketing, but for this kind of application, it’s overkill. Your darkest exposure is for capturing the world outside the windows. The other two are for the interior. Make sure you’ve cleared the room of anything that might cause ghosting across multiple exposures. Ceiling fans should be turned off and small children put away in a cupboard under the stairs.

Step 3: Shoot Squares, 45s, and Details

It’s a good rule of thumb to shoot each room from a few angles. I generally shoot a mix of squared-up shots (all of the lines form close to right angles) and 45-degree shots (shoot from the corners of the room). Some rental companies require multiple shots per room, so it's a big help if the client has several shots of each room that feel different and offer unique perspectives. Shoot as wide as your lens will let you. It’s good to have extra room for editing and cropping (more on that in step 5).

Details are important, because it’s the little touches that make listings stand out. If they have a flower arrangement or potted plants, take a few photos to tell viewers that the place is well appointed. Detail photos do not need to be bracketed. Shoot them at a wider aperture to have a more stylized, shallow depth of field look.

Step 4: Stack and Merge in Lightroom

A recent Lightroom update allows you to run HDR on multiple stacks of images at once. This will save you a ton of editing time. After importing your photos, highlight your bracketed images and hit Ctrl+G (Command+G for Mac) to stack a set. Side note: if you want to, you can have Lightroom auto-stack images by time elapsed between brackets of images. It works pretty well, but it isn’t foolproof. If you had any interruptions in your shoot or if you moved at a varied pace, the timing issues will throw off the whole stacking process. Either way, once all of your images are stacked, select all of the stacks and hit Ctrl+H (Command+H for Mac). Select “Auto-Align” and “Auto-Settings” as well as your desired de-ghost amount, then hit “Merge” to start running the HDR process.

Step 5: Other Tweaks and Edits

Ideally, you want a neutral white balance and a pleasingly bright overall exposure. I like to use the eye-dropper tool for consistent white balance. Bring down the highlights and whites and bring up the blacks and shadows to create a nice, even exposure. Add a pop of contrast, and you’re ready to transform.

Auto Transform is a great starting place for transforming your images. It works really well 80% of the time. Unfortunately, you have to go through each HDR image and select "Auto" for each photo individually. If you copy and paste settings or sync auto-transform, there are often errors, and you’ll have to hit “Update” in the corner of the Transform panel for each individual shot anyway.

If Auto Transform renders your image looking truly bizarre, use the guided transform tool. Pick distorted/angled lines near the edges of the frame as your reference lines. Many times, any transformation will result in an image with strange borders. Just crop the image back to a normal ratio and you’re good to go. For a little punch in my interior shots, I run a -10 post-crop vignette on all my images.

That’s it. It's fairly simple to get all the shots quickly and easily. If you're overwhelmed, make yourself a consistent shot list to work from. Soon enough, you'll start to develop a naturally flowing system for your shoots. 

Have you picked up any personal tricks for Airbnb photography? Share in the comments!