When a hotel or venue has just invested significantly in a refurbishment, they want people to know about it — and they want to know immediately.
That’s exactly the situation we were brought in for at the Holiday Inn near Birmingham Airport. The hotel had undergone a substantial renovation and needed imagery that showed the new spaces properly: the bar area, the seating, the atmosphere they’d worked hard to create. Not the flat, overlit interior shots that characterise a lot of hotel photography, but something that actually conveyed how the spaces felt.
The challenge with interior photography
Hotel and venue interiors present a particular set of lighting challenges. Most spaces have existing ambient light — ceiling fixtures, lamps, windows — that creates a mixed colour temperature environment that cameras don’t handle naturally. Shoot purely on the ambient light and you typically get warm, orange-cast images from tungsten sources alongside cooler daylight from windows, with areas that are simply too dark to read properly.
The solution we use is to balance our own supplementary lighting against the existing ambient — adding light where the room needs it, correcting colour where necessary, and working to preserve the atmosphere the designers intended rather than replacing it with flat, even illumination. The goal is always an image that looks like the room at its best, not a room that’s been lit for a photograph.
What this hotel needed
The Birmingham Airport location gave the hotel a distinct identity — a setting that connects the venue to both its airport proximity and the city itself. We visited twice to capture the spaces at the right time of day and under the right conditions: the bar area with its new seating, the corridors showing the scale and quality of the renovation, the overall feel of a space that had been carefully thought through.
The images needed to work across multiple platforms — the hotel’s own website, booking platforms like Booking.com and Expedia where the visual quality of images directly affects click-through rates, and marketing materials for corporate clients. Each of those contexts has slightly different requirements, and we deliver files suited to all of them.
When interior photography pays for itself
In the hospitality sector, photography is one of the highest-return investments a venue can make. Studies consistently show that hotels with higher-quality photography achieve better booking conversion rates on the major platforms. A refurbishment that costs tens of thousands of pounds but is represented by mediocre photography is an investment that isn’t showing itself to its best advantage.
We work with hotels, restaurants, private venues and event spaces across the West Midlands and UK-wide. If you’re opening, refurbishing or simply overdue a photography refresh, get in touch and let’s talk about what you need.
To find out more about our commercial photography work, visit our service page.
Related reading: Location Photography: Getting the Most From Real-World Shoots.
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