Studio note · 12 March 2026
First-screen crops: 16:9 is not 4:5 with the sides shaved.
A hotel booking page lives or dies in the first 1,200 pixels. The crop that sits there is a job, not an afterthought. This note is what I send with the folder so a developer does not invent a crop at 23:40 the night before launch.
Most hotel templates assume a 16:9 or 21:9 hero. Instagram wants 4:5. Booking.com still mangles a 1:1. If you take one horizontal and slice it three ways, at least one of those slices will lie. The bed falls out. The window becomes a slit. The chair that told you the room had a person in it is gone.
What I shoot for
On a hospitality job I mark three compositions in the notes, on site, before the tripod moves:
- A 16:9 for the site header. The important object (usually the window, sometimes the bed foot) sits in the left third so a booking widget on the right does not cover it.
- A 4:5 for mobile and for any card grid. The vertical has to be a picture, not a crop. That often means a second exposure, not a tighter file.
- A 1:1 only if the room can hold a square. Many corridors cannot. I will not deliver a square that is a horizontal with dead ceiling.
The folder crops/ has these already made. If your template is 21:9, say so on the brief. I can leave extra sky or extra floor. I cannot invent a window that was never in the frame.
The first screen does the booking
Guests decide in the time it takes the image to load. They are not reading the headline. They are checking whether the room looks like a place they would sleep. A bright, empty, centred bed photographed at noon says catalogue. A bed in the hour the shutters actually sit half-drawn says this house. Casa Bruma’s old site opened on a drone still of the roof. The new one opens on the courtyard at dusk. João Pereira stopped having to explain the hotel on the phone. That is the metric.
Lumen Stay’s first screen is Apt. 3B at 08:12. The window is the subject. The sofa is in the frame because it is in the room, not because a board asked for lifestyle. Inês Costa’s occupancy note is on the home page. Web teams still ask for something more aspirational and then watch the bounce rate.
Safe zones
Assume a booking bar, a cookie strip, and a hamburger. Keep lamps out of the top 80 pixels and the bottom 120. I pencil this on the polaroid. If your designer later puts a 200-pixel caption overlay on the hero, tell them the crop was not built for that. We can make another file. We should not guess.
Type on the image is your problem. I will not shoot a darker frame so white letters look expensive. If you need type, put it on the paper beside the picture, as this site does.
Colour on first load
Heroes are exported sRGB, quality 80 at 2000px on the long side. The master TIFFs sit in print/. Do not run the hero through an extra warmth preset. Portra is already warm. A second pass makes the plaster look ill.
What I will refuse
A request to just make it brighter. A request to put a guest in the bed who was not there. A request to clone out a radiator that the architect specified. A request to turn a 16:9 into a story of five slides that autoplay. If the house needs more pictures, we shoot another hour. We do not animate the one we have.
On Casa Bruma the first-screen file is the courtyard, not Room 4, because the booking engine already shows beds. The room stills sit one scroll down. On Lumen Stay the opposite was true: the product is the apartment window, so the window leads. The crop follows the thing the guest is buying, not the thing that is easiest to photograph at noon.
If you are rebuilding a template, send me the header height and whether a widget sits on the right. I would rather make the file on site than patch it in Lisbon at midnight. That hour is in the fee if you ask on the estimate. It is €180 if you ask after delivery.
Filed 12 March 2026, Alcântara. Related: the handoff note, Casa Bruma, and Lumen Stay.