From highlighting the best features of a Bangkok city hotel to the beachside resorts of Phuket and Hua Hin, the right hotel photography experts can help you raise your average daily rate.
Professional hotel room photography elevates your luxury brand. This guide reveals essential techniques for managing light in guestrooms, preventing overexposure, and using advanced methods such as ambient lighting. Master shooting in windowless bathrooms with artificial sources and exposure blending to produce high-quality, true-to-life images and boost your hotel’s RevPAR.
How to get good lighting for indoor photos?
Capturing the perfect pictures of your hotel poses a unique challenge. Between the number of room types, F&B outlets, and conference rooms to take, organizing a shot list that can work during optimal natural lighting for each room can take weeks to months for the inexperienced photographer. Accurate representation of natural lighting has a significant impact on customer satisfaction. This means that it is not always possible or recommended to stage additional interior photography lighting in hotels.
Natural lighting in the guest and meeting rooms is often considered a key feature of the rooms. However, taking a picture of a room while facing a light-generating window can lead the pictures to be overexposed. On the other hand, large ballrooms are often set up to not have windows, with harsh overhead lighting that does not allow for clean or flattering pictures of the setup. So, how can you prepare yourself to receive the best indoor photography shots possible for your luxury hotel?
How to stage interior lighting for photography?
One of the biggest tips for interior photography is that a window is never just a window. The room facing North or South will have one of the biggest impacts on natural light, working with you rather than against you. A south-facing window will allow bright, direct sunlight into the room that will either overexpose the pictures if the sun hits directly, or cast harsh shadows the moment the sun starts to move. A north-facing window will light up the room with indirect light, allowing you to manipulate the lighting with a lot more control and flexibility.
The continuity of the lighting for consistent hotel branding will also influence the time of day during which a photographer can work. When updating the pictures of a hotel’s different room types, you cannot organize some of the shots during golden hour, with the other half taken under the morning light. Ambient lighting can drastically change within a 15 minute time-frame depending on the source. This will influence your hotel’s conversion rates per room type.
Organizing a tour with your interior design photographer and their light meter before the shooting date will help them ensure consistency in lighting throughout. The flambient technique will often be used where ambient light and reflectors are not sufficient to deliver this. This will help your photographer optimize the order and timing of each staging room photography planned before the shooting day.
Interior photography: How to prevent windows from being overexposed?
It is not always possible to stage north-facing rooms for the ideal interior hotel photography sessions. Making sure that your hotel photographer has the right reflectors and light diffusers will be your saving grace here. A built-in flash will be the last thing to use, as they are more appropriate for event photography.
For example, using a white sheet on the ground out of camera view, where the direct sun enters the room, will reflect the light towards the ceiling and light up the room with a beautiful glow. While shadows can be used creatively in portrait, editorial, and architectural photography, they often need to be minimized in indoor hotel photography to show details and space properly. Softening the rest of the shadows with professionally placed soft lights will help the photographer to mimic the optimal lighting conditions of a north-facing room.
Delivering the best results in a south-facing room will also require higher photography technical skills, such as:
- setting the camera’s white balance to match natural lighting
- balancing the color temperature of the ambient lighting with any bounced and diffused light sources using lighting gels (colored plastic sheets)
- layering and adjusting multiple exposures to get the appropriate background brightness
- playing with aperture without losing details to a blurred background
- Setting the ISO to increase the camera’s sensitivity to light
- Shutter speed for longer exposures to capture more light can only be done for indoor photography when there are no moving subjects.
These factors are important to take into consideration as they will affect how much photography gear, planning, and extra editing your photographer will need to include in the contract.
How to mimic daylight for interior bathroom photography lighting?
Many luxury hotels do not have the option to equip the hotel bathrooms with windows. Especially in standard rooms, where space tends to be more limited than in the hotel’s suites. While the advice above would also apply to bathrooms with access to natural daylight, photographers will often also have to deliver shots of artificially lit bathrooms. An important factor to consider is that the materials used in a hotel bathroom will often be more reflective compared to the sleeping area.
Think tiles vs. carpets, white walls vs. darker wallpaper, marble countertops vs. wooden or velvet-covered furniture, mirrors vs. black TV screens, and you can imagine how bounced light might suddenly play against you. Two types of external lights can be used depending on the photographer’s preference; some professional photographers prefer strobe, while others prefer continuous LED lighting. As the name suggests, strobe lights only flood the scene at the same time as the shutter is triggered. Avoiding reflective surfaces, such as mirrors, means that shots cannot be directly mirror-facing. This will require a good grasp of angles, multiple exposures, and often, extra editing.
In either case, additional lights and extra diffusion, such as a softbox, a white sheet, an octabox, or a parabolic umbrella, will often be necessary in artificial lighting with reflective surfaces. Reflectors will also be needed to direct any unwanted lights or shadows away from your shot, as the bathroom walls will often act as natural reflectors. This can work in the favor of a skilled photographer, especially if there are no standout color casts from the lights or the decoration.
The standard recommendation to avoid dealing with color casts from ruining post-production flow is to use the flambient technique. However, this is only possible in rooms where ambient lighting is already present. In rooms with only artificial light, a great tip is to take a base exposure with all the lights off, a base exposure with all the original room’s lights on, as well as an extra exposure with any additional light sources the photographer plans on using. These shots can make or break the final shot by providing the photographer with the possibility to perform exposure blending with the bracket shots to achieve the most true-to-life lighting for the benefit of your luxury hotel clients.
