The dazzling luxury rooms, stunning bathrooms, amazing views of the balcony, and vibrant and mouth-watering delicacies, are some of the things guests look for in a hotel or a resort. Of course, each guest persona looks for something unique.
Comfy rooms, cozy common spaces, and vibrant ambience are included in the checklists of guests as well. The main job of hotel photography is to showcase the best of your property to your potential guests.
Whether you are a hotelier, influencer or photographer, utmost care, dedication and skills are required to bring out the personality of a hotel with the help of photography. Simply showing the various rooms and amenities is not enough. That’s why property owners need hotel photography tips from professionals.
Hotel photography needs to make the guests experience the exquisite luxury of entering inside a five-star heritage property or the comfort of a mid-range hotel.
If you have a restaurant, the food photographs need to tempt the guests, while they imagine themselves relishing these delicacies and enjoying the premium F&B experience. To get the best results, certain hotel photography tips need to be followed.
Need For Professional Hotel Photographers
Hotel Photography has now emerged as an art form. It is no longer something which any photographer can do, without any specific training and experience of course. That’s why hoteliers prefer to hire professional photographers who have immense experience in capturing the beauty and essence of the hotels.
Not only that, even hotel and resort owners are trying their hands at hotel photography. If you have a passion for hotel photography, anyone can be a skilled photographer with training and experience. The photographs can make or break the image and reputation of your property.
Here, we will give you hotel photography tips for hoteliers, influencers, and hotel photographers. With this ultimate guide for hotel photography, you will be able to make the guests fall in love with the property even before they visit!
Hotel Photography Tips - Master The Art
Here we have curated the best hotel photography tips and ideas that will serve as a guide. With this, you will be able to click, or direct the photographers under you to click, the best hotel photographers.
1. Photography Gear - The Essential Tools
Imagine you want to cook something, and you are given the best ingredients. You are a master chef yourself, with unparalleled skills in culinary arts. However, the moment you enter the kitchen you realise that no utensils can be seen. But you are still asked to prepare a dish. Can you do that? The answer is obvious.
The same is with hotel photography. No matter how advanced your skills are, or how good your canvas i.e the hotel rooms, amenities and ambience are, you will never be able to click photographs without proper gear. Sure, smartphones are equipped with high-quality cameras. However, for hotel photography, you surely may need something more.
The best way to go around it is to use a wide-angle lens combined with full-frame sensor cameras. There are two types of cameras available - DSLR Cameras and Mirrorless Cameras. Along with a camera, you need a sturdy tripod as well.
However, it also depends on your budget. If you feel that a high-quality smartphone camera with a tripod can do the job for you, then no need to spend too much on expensive cameras.
2. Lighting Is Everything
As a blogger-cum-website content writer, I have seen various hotel photographs of different hotel properties. And trust me, bad lighting can make the joke out of your hotel. It is always better to use natural lighting. The best mode of photography is HDR or High Dynamic Range Photography.
High Dynamic Range means the difference between the lightest and the darkest elements of your photographs. HDR Mode enables the capture that range much better than the ordinary smartphone camera. It can also balance out the image if there is too much contrast due to sunlight. However, you need to experiment and see whether HDR mode will always be the best mode for hotel photography.
3. Shoot From Corners For Room Images
Hotel photography aims to showcase the hotel rooms and amenities accurately. By shooting from corners, you will be able to highlight the proper size of the room. That’s why hotel photographers use a wide-angle lens since it allows you to take a wider view of the property.
Diagonal photographs always give a more accurate view of the rooms, since the real size of the rooms is perceived diagonally. However, you can experiment with different angles and choose what is best for you.
4. Ensure That Everything Is Set
Hotel rooms do get messy and the sheets do get all over the place. However, hotel photography aims to show your property at its most elegant (Realism has its place). You need to ensure that the rooms are tidy, the bedsheets are in place, and there is no unnecessary distraction in the photographs.
Ensure that the bathrooms are clean and tidy. Most importantly, PLEASE close the lid of the toilet when the click the hotel photographs. Bathrooms are a pain point for many hotel guests. No matter how good your hotel room is, if your bathrooms are substandard, your potential customers will not give your hotel a second look. It is one of the most underrated hotel photography tips.
5. Always Provide An Outside View
Most of the time, hotel guests are interested in checking what is outside their property. This is one of the hotel photography tips that people ignore. You need to show the view from the rooms, even if there is not much to see outside. Guests always appreciate a complete view of the property.
6. Avoid Using Wide Angle View Too Much
Yes, we know that you had recommended a wide-angle lens as a hotel photography tip. However, everything in this guide comes with the following caveats, “Don’t overuse anything” and “Be flexible according to the situation”.
The main pain point with a wide-angle lens is that it ends up creating a false sense of space at times. More than anything, guests hate to be deceived, especially regarding the room size. That’s why hotels prefer to not go wider than 24 mm while clicking photographs.
Sometimes, it is always a great artistic decision to give a more focused view of the property and amenities. For example, if you want to go for some experience-based or artistic photographs.
7. Your Images Should Guide The Eyes
Hotel photography aims to ensure that the person is looking at the image in the way you want. This involves clicking photos using lines as a guide. Your images should have a focus. For example, if you want to focus on the pool as a central point, but also want to emphasise the vastness of the surrounding area, click your photos that way.
8. Don’t Edit Your Image Too Much
It is tempting to experiment with your editing skills in Photoshop or any other editing software, but please understand one thing - Customer value honesty. Even if you are planning to edit the hotel images, please do in a way that does not distort reality. Editing is supposed to enhance reality, not cloud it.
For example, if you want to change the contrast and saturation a bit, you can do so. However, you should not change the colours of your images, or edit so much that it completely changes the look of your property.
9. Use The Right Camera Settings
Use an aperture that is smaller than or equal to f8. A smaller aperture means somewhere around f9 or f10. A small aperture with proper focusing can lead to clear and crisp images, which are the BARE MINIMUM for hotel photography. If there is a need to go for wider apertures, you should always use a sturdy tripod.
Bigfoot Hospitality - Professional Hotel Photography
Last but not least, one of the most important hotel photography tips is to hire professional services dedicated to the hospitality industry. It is always convenient for hoteliers to hire wedding photographers or generic photographers for hotel photoshoots. However, one should not compromise on quality to save costs.
Ultimately, compromising on quality will be costly at the end of the day. That’s why we are here to provide the best quality hotel photography and video making. Bigfoot Hospitality is here to offer you hotel photoshoot services.
We have a team of professional and experienced photographers that click the best hotel photographs to take your social media and hotel marketing to the next level.
Read our blogs to know more about the hotel industry and its various concepts, trends and challenges.
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