As mentioned in earlier posts, the importance of quality hotel photography is crucial in this digital age. An underlying concern, aside from the quality, is visual continuity when producing imagery for a specific client or brand. This can be quite difficult to achieve when hiring multiple photographers to shoot your hotel photography. However, with carefully placed parameters and a little planning, the lack of continuity can be bridged to ensure a good result.
We encourage the independent ownership groups we work with to contract with a specific hotel photographer to keep the “sphere of continuity” to a much more simple and predictable result. This will create a portfolio of images for the company which meet brand standards, while utilizing the lighting and production skills of a single photographer.
Worldwide brands such as Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and Hyatt have such large-scale inventory that it’s impossible to utilize a small handful of hotel photographers. Each of these brands faces the most difficult of visual continuity issues, and they know it. They very carefully screen each potential hotel photographer for the right skills in lighting, composition, and technical ability.
Once those thresholds are passed, they let the photographer know the specifics of each brand requirement. Each brand has its own set of visual objectives, and often they are quite different from one another. This can pose a challenge to each hotel photographer – each time an assignment begins they’re faced with the situation where they have to plan, both creatively and logistically, to follow out the production standards of that specific brand. With each photographer often shooting for many brands, that can be a challenge in itself.
The importance of visual continuity is achieved through careful collaboration between the brand creative team and each photographer hired to produce imagery for that brand. The end result brings forward the creative vision and desired content for each individual brand. Without this process, photos representing the same brand would be a rudderless ship of mismatched imagery, clouding the visual message and ultimately costing the company money in the long run.
Marriott Country Club Plaza Kansas City, MO
Hampton Inn and Suites Garden Grove, CA
