Hotel Photography – Lighting In Sections

One of the challenges of hotel photography is photographing an operational property. It is nice to shoot hotels before they are actually open for business, but hotels are in constant need of photography as they expand, remodel and re-brand, so photography is usually needed when the property is already operational and full of guests. As a result, the goal of shooting a particular room or amenity is to close it for as little time as possible, so that the hotel guests are not inconvenienced.

Many spaces can be photographed when in the hotel is experiencing little or no guest traffic, but some hotels experience heavy guest traffic even in the early morning hours. I recently ran into that problem when I was photographing the lobby at the Hilton LAX. Even in the early morning hours the hotel lobby had quite a bit of foot traffic, and we did not want to close it off to guests while we photographed. We got around this dilema by lighting the room in sections and rebuilding the photograph in post . By using this technique we only had to close off one section of the lobby at a time. This is one of the many areas of hospitality photography that have been improved for the photographer, the hotel and the hotel guest by the digital capture and post advancements of the last few years. Here is the image.