Boutique Hotel Photographer in Downtown Nashville

I can now add boutique hotel photographer to my resume as I was recently commissioned to photograph a boutique hotel in downtown Nashville, TN that was recently renovated. The hotel was formerly called Hotel Indigo, but with the facelift also came with a new name “The Countrypolitan”.
Dallas, Texas-based design firm, Studio 11 Design, completed the project just 3-4 months ago and the marketing materials were being created so this was a quick-turnaround project. My client, San Diego, CA, and Austin, TX-based JMI, contacted me to see if there was any way we could get in to shoot in the next week and have images delivered by the following week. Being one who is always up for a challenge, I accepted and we got to planning.

After coordinating with the hotel manager and marketing coordinator, I arrived at the hotel planning on simply doing a walkthrough and scout, but realized that I had a small window of about 2-3 hours to photograph the restaurant and public spaces before patrons began to arrive – so I decided to just go ahead and get started.

The other thing I forgot to mention is that I was traveling during this time and wasn’t able to get any preliminary idea of what the interiors looked like, so I decided it would be best to bring all of my equipment with me so that I was prepared for any challenges that arose during this photo shoot. The one thing I knew right off the bat is that the biggest challenge by far would be the color palette and the brightness of the room. Nothing a little knowledge and experience can’t fix, but let me explain why these were challenging to give you a better sense of what I was working with.

The human eye sees around 26 stops of light – meaning we can see essentially pitch black to the brightest of highlights in any given scene. A camera, on the other hand, only sees around 14 or so on average so we often need to compensate by using multiple frames or supplemental lighting. Cameras can also have a difficult time with white balance – especially when there are multiple colors and light sources. In this instance, we were dealing with warm-colored furniture and decor, but dark and cool walls and ceilings. The rooms were also very tall with only one wall of windows, so the room couldn’t be filled entirely with natural light – so there was artificial lighting such as lamps and chandeliers to compensate. The challenge with this is the window light is around 5600k and the interior lighting was probably around 7500k or warmer. All of these components are confusing for a camera so it is the interiors and architectural photographer’s job to solve these problems both on-location and in post-production.

The other challenge was that I was in a huge time crunch. I had 3 hours to create at least 12 images in this area. I knew that with that amount of time I would not be able to set up any supplemental lighting (flash) or do too much staging, so I knew that I would be heavily relying on post-production to complete these photographs. As far as staging was concerned, fortunately, there wasn’t too much for me to do in this area other than straighten up some furniture here and there.

Here are a handful of photos from this shoot, but be sure to scroll down to the end to watch a timelapse of the editing process that goes into shoots like this. For some reason, I screen record every edit that I do and am always looking for a reason to share. Hope you enjoy the process!