Design of an Architecture Photography Shoot

Any major construction project comes with a surprising amount of hurdles even before the building or renovation starts, from design variations and material availability to zoning and permitting, but there’s nothing like that feeling of accomplishment when something that didn’t exist before has been brought into the world. When your project is complete, or even as it goes through various stages, you’ll need photographs to show off the progress and the finished product to inspire prospective clients to work with you, but those wide angle iPhone shots aren’t quite going to cut it. Hiring a professional photographer is the best way to capture your vision, but you might not know where to start or what to expect. I’m going to demystify the process for you, covering everything involved in a photoshoot centered on design from outreach to planning the shoot day and image delivery.

Starting the Conversation

If you search around for local photographers on the internet, you’re going to find different methods for outreach. Some might have a form on their website that asks for specific details and others might just provide their email or phone number for direct outreach, but the important thing is to give the photographer a sense of the scope of your needs. Are we shooting a residence, interiors and exteriors; a commercial building with lobbies, conference rooms, and office spaces; maybe a hospital or college campus with multiple buildings and specialty areas? 

What a photographer is looking to parse out here is how many images need to be made and how many days of shooting and editing your project is going to require. These two factors are going to determine how I or any other photographer is going to build a quote for you.

The Quote

There’s a lot of variation in fee structure, but the items to focus on below are 1-3. If you have any questions you should ask your photographer and they should be happy to answer them.

1. A ranged number of images - If a photographer charges by image, this will determine their entire quote, and you should know how many images you’ll get upfront and how much it will cost. If your photographer charges by the day or uses another basis, you should still see a number of images so that you and the photographer are on the same page before getting started.
2. A Day Rate or Creative Fee - If a photographer bases their quote on the number of days rather than images, their quote will reflect their Day Rate, or Creative Fee, but it is the value of using their eyes and mind for the days of shooting and their skills in retouching.
3. Capture Fee or Digital Production - These terms cover RAW file processing for digital images (more on that in a separate article) as well as file storage/ backups and delivery of files if using an online platform to share the final images. 
4. Licensing or Usage Fees - When you hire a professional photographer, they're creating intellectual property through artistic vision, and as such they will own the copyright to the images. What you get as the client is the license to use the images they create in a variety of ways and your photographer should provide language that lays out what you can do with them. Most licensing includes website, social media, and competition entry, but larger advertising campaigns may require additional licensing depending on planned scope.
5. Retouching Fees - This will vary based on the photographer, as some group the time for retouching into their day rate or creative fee, one day of photography may take one day of retouching, so a quote will include two days of their Day Rate. Retouching is where we blend exposures, remove blemishes like footprints in grass or unwanted people, and add subtle effects to make certain features of your design pop. Depending on the photographer and the quantity of images, this might be quoted as an hourly, daily, or per-image fee.
6. Assistant fees - Photographers have assistants on occasion to help to carry equipment, stage furniture, turn lights on and off, direct people in a shot, and generally coordinate with a client or other workers on-site to clear the camera’s view when it’s time to take the final shot. This will vary by photographer and region, but is usually two to four hundred bucks for a day.
7. Props/ Miscellaneous fees - These are optional and not part of every quote, but if a photographer needs to purchase anything to stage a particular photograph, say potted flowers to add some color to landscaping, you can expect this to be passed along on a quote or final invoice.
8. Travel Fees - For the more remote projects that require a photographer to fly to a location more than a couple hours from their home, you’l be covering their travel costs and probably a reduced Day Rate for the time traveling. A day flying is a day we’re spending for your project that we can’t work on something closer to home.

The Shoot Day

Now that you and your photographer have agreed on a quote, and a day for the shoot (assuming the weather is cooperating for what you need), we can talk about how the day(s) of photography will be organized.

Who Needs to be on Set 

As with everything I’ve noted so far, it depends. For photographing a hotel, different rooms, lobbies, conference areas, maybe just someone with a master key that can let the photographer in to do their thing. If we’re photographing a multi-million dollar home, someone from the Architect’s or Designer’s office familiar with the project should be there to collaborate on the photography, signing off on each image as we work throughout the day. This avoids any surprises on delivery, and can also be a fun and insightful experience for our clients as they get to see their vision translated in real time.

Framing and Staging

Some things can move, others just won’t, so we tend to structure images around what doesn’t move, things like columns, walls, doorways, paving stones, and kitchen islands. These determine the structure of our composition, and we can then move furniture or potted plants to get our finished look. My preference is to  make a couple of test shots to get the composition and settings right, then stage for the final shot. I’ve rearranged patio furniture, potted plants, blankets, bird cages, even backyard soccer goals, to get a clean and beautiful shot. Once all the distracting elements are out of the frame or hidden behind cabinetry or couches, we’ll take our final shots, get your sign off, and move to the next one.

Following the Light

The main ordering principle through the day is to follow the sun and the natural light. A wall of textured stone is going to look best when the sun is just off to the side, highlighting the outcroppings and creating shadows. If that same stone is in shadow or the sun is hitting it directly, it’s going to look flat, so it’s worth waiting for the right light to capture that texture. A photographer worth their camera will be aware of where the sun is going to move through the day, and might start with a  walk through of a property to anticipate how the light will filter into the space to build a mental schedule of where to be when.

The Hero Shot 

This is the last and often best shot of the day, as the sun sets, the lights in a building make it come alive. There’s a 20 minute window when we can balance the twilight with the warmth of an interior that maintains detail in the face of a building. It’s a dramatic look that takes more art than science to achieve the right mood, and it may take putting a few shots together if the lights throughout a building or home don’t quite match up.

That’s a Wrap

There’s a lot that goes into creating high quality images, and plenty more nuance I haven’t covered, but this is a good baseline of what to expect when engaging a photographer to capture your project.