I’m a big fan of Airbnb. I always love living just a little bit like a local when I’m visiting a new place. I almost always go hunting for an Airbnb to stay at instead of hotels, so I’m always excited to do a project where I get to help out an Airbnb owner.
In this case, it was a little 3 bedroom house in North Bergen, NJ, for a very friendly fellow who was kind enough to make me an espresso while I was in there photographing the place. Fortunately it was already well staged, so I didn’t have to spend much time moving things around, and instead got to focus on composition and light placement for each image.
What most surprised me was the level of precision and craftsmanship that went into the renovation, and it turned out that the owner did a lot of of the work himself. Very impressive. I remember one time I made a tile backsplash behind my stove, and let’s just say it did not come out quite so polished.
I had a really good time on this shoot - I spent 4 hours on site totally absorbed in making images and finished up with around 20 great ones - Here are some of my favorites.
By the way, scroll down past my images if you’re interested in seeing the “before” images of what the owner had posted before he hired me.
After
Tap on an image below to open lightbox, then you can rotate to landscape and swipe if on mobile.
Before
Below are the images the owner had before he brought me in photograph his space. I’m really excited to see what impact this will have on his bookings. It’s a bit too soon to know now, but I’m going to check in a few months down the road and then in a year to see what return he gets year over year. The difference in images is pretty drastic, and I’ll bet the increase in bookings will reflect that. I’ll put an update here once I’ve got that data (it obviously won't be for a while).
