By Michelle Chaplow

• Please don’t cut my head and legs off

In every family there is one person who is a disaster with a camera  – someone who has a reputation for cutting off people’s heads whenever they take a picture. So, when a camera or phone is offered around at social occasions, that person most probably won’t be nominated to capture the event.

Please don´t cut off the flower heads and chair legs from hotel images

As a photographer you always want your images to be given to the very best designers who can display your work as beautifully as possible on a page, whether in print or digital. However on hotel websites there was a dreadful, unforgiving tendency for web designers to crop full-frame images into panoramic (long, narrow strip) format as soon as they get their hands on them. Hotel Photographs are meticulously planned over many weeks, and designed to showcase the property to its fullest potential in what is called full frame.

A decade ago the panoramic stylet became a trend in web design, fortunately nowadays, most hotels know the benefits larger images, but there are still many examples of websites with “letterbox” images, that could enjoy a win-win by uploading the orginal uncropped images. To undertand this concept here is an example.

This is full-frame photograph size

This is a panoramic crop

A carefully composed image of two chairs and flowers

The image with a panoramic crop – cuts the heads off the flowers, the legs off the chairs and table

Even now we can still  see images on hotel websites that have been shot in full frame and cropped into panoramic.

Worse still, if a human does the cropping they can at least try to make the most of the crop. But many images are resized on the fly – in other words, a computer makes the decision based on arithmetic rather than actually “looking” at the photo, and the image gets progressively worse, ultimately compromising the appearance of the property.

Some very early websites had such a narrow crop that you could not make sense of anything.

So if web developers love panoramic, why not shoot in panoramic?

Photography is used across many mediums, so if you shoot images only on panoramic, you can never use them in a double-page spread in a magazine, since the format is the wrong shape; it isn’t deep enough. The magazine and advertising worlds are totally geared up for full frame.
Coupled with the fact that so few images are naturally panoramic, full frame is better on all counts.

The human eye has a vision similar to a standard lens, we don´t naturally  view the world in panoramic, so if you want to attract guests, it is more advantageous make the viewing of images easy to interpret. Or “easy on the eye”

So why do web designers often choose panoramic images?

Many web developers believe that by having text above the fold i.e. right under the images on the first screen view of a website (without the reader having to scroll down), readers will be more quickly engaged. At the end of the day, people will interpret the images first, then read the text, so in my opinion the imagery is much more important. If the picture makes an impact, it is more likely that a guest will continue to scroll and this provides more engagment and therefor more chances of a hotel reservation.

Text on hotel pages relates to Google and ranking; many developers will tell you they need the text. This is true, but it doesn’t have to be at the top – Google will read and rank the page, whether the text is at the top or the bottom, so that argument doesn’t wash either.

Sophie Carefull, photographer and an avid traveller, said: “If a hotel’s photographs haven’t been presented properly, I would imagine they also lack attention to detail in the running of their establishment, which would lead me to look elsewhere when choosing a place to stay.”

Photography is a universal language, you can create an idea of a hotel, even if the text is written in a foreign language.  Cropping images will interfere with the original message.

If you want to convey your hotel story, keep imagery in full frame 

So hoteliers, be mindful of the advantages of full frame make sure that your web designers, do not crop the images that hotel photography crews have painstakingly planned and created, right down to every last detail. Cropping into panoramic can be a disservice to your hotel clients and potential customers.

Let customers see the whole picture, let photography with a strong “take me there” message encourage the room reservation.

 

Hoteliers, If you have a hotel website with panoramic imagery, where your hotel photograpy has been cropped, we have good news, work with your web designer to increase the size to full frame and reap those visual storytelling rewards.

Full-frame visual storytelling will not only improve the dsplay of your photography, it can be a route to hotel reservation success.

If you need more help or advice on this subject, just drop us a line