Hotel photographer tips – lighting

Want some great photographs of your hotel? Hopefully the answer to that is “yes” as you’ll have realised that giving your potential customers some superb pictures of your hotel will increase your sales and also help your website rank as these pictures are shared. So with that in mind, we want to help you along with some simple tips that will make sure you get the best out of your photographs, regardless of the equipment used.

Our first tip is about lighting and it’s a simple one…

Use plenty of light

There are two main ways of getting more light in your photos. The first is to simply let more light into the room by opening all the curtains (especially good on a sunny day) or setting up lots of external lighting. A small lighting rig doesn’t cost much and they will give you many options to flood your room with light, give you filters to you can set up effects to highlight certain areas of the room or give your flash that extra bit of help.

You’ll need to experiment with lighting as the way it works will depend heavily on the size of the room and the furnishings within it. A mirror in the wrong place can bounce the light and look terrible, conversely it can be used to great effect and to make a room look larger than it is.

The second way to increase the light is to increase the exposure time of the camera. Simply set the shutter speed to stay open longer, more light will be let in and your pictures will be brighter. This can be preferable in some rooms that are already set out with lots of mood lighting and it can give your photos the expensive and polished feel that your hotel wants to promote.