Wie ich zwei 5-Sterne-Luxushotels mit meinem iPhone fotografierte. 📱

Diese Geschichte handelt nicht davon, dass Handy-Kameras professionelle Kameras ersetzen. Vielmehr zeigt sie, wie ein Fotograf trotz widriger Umstände mit begrenzten Mitteln erfolgreich sein kann.

Vor kurzem reiste ich für fünf Wochen nach Südamerika. Nach einer Woche in Patagonien landete ich in Calama, Nord-Chile, wo mir am Busterminal mein Kamerarucksack gestohlen wurde – zwei Minuten vor der Abfahrt und innerhalb von fünf Sekunden. Trotz Air-Tag-Ortung blieb die chilenische Polizei untätig. Der Verlust war ein Schock und ich brauchte Wochen, um ihn zu verarbeiten.

Besonders hart traf mich, dass ich bereits zwei Fotografie-Buchungen im ***** Relais & Châteaux Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel und im ***** Relais & Châteaux CIRQA in Arequipa hatte. Zwei Wochen lang suchte ich verzweifelt nach einer Ersatzkamera in Chile, Bolivien und Peru – ohne Erfolg. Schließlich fand ich in Cusco eine gebrauchte Kamera! Ich war überglücklich und benachrichtigte beide Hotels, dass ich nun endlich eine Kamera gefunden habe.

Doch zu früh gefreut: Bereits am ersten Tag der Benutzung funktionierte sie schon nicht mehr. Ich stand also wieder am Anfang - ohne funktionierende Kamera. Wieder überbrachte ich die schlechten Neuigkeiten den Hotels. Statt einer Stornierung, bekam ich unerwartete Unterstützung:

„We deeply regret what happened. We highly value your skill and expertise in visual content production, so we agree with your suggestion to use your iPhone for photos and videos.“

Dank des Vertrauens der Hotels fotografierte ich schließlich mit meinem iPhone. Ihre Rückmeldung war überwältigend positiv:

„Once again, we wanted to express our gratitude for your collaboration. Your images have beautifully captured the essence of the hotel in an extraordinary way.“

Dieses Erlebnis beweist nicht, dass professionelle Kameras überflüssig sind – im Gegenteil, ich hätte viel lieber damit gearbeitet. Es zeigt vielmehr, dass gutes Equipment alleine keinen guten Fotografen ausmacht; ein guter Fotograf erzielt auch mit begrenzten Mitteln hervorragende Ergebnisse. Ebenso wenig lobt niemand bei einem Restaurantbesuch den Koch für seine gute Pfanne sondern für seine Kochkünste. Hier scheint es klar zu sein, dass der Kauf einer guten Pfanne nicht genügt, um ein kulinarisches Erlebnis zu zaubern.

Und schlussendlich konnte auch niemand auf LinkedIn erkennen, dass die Fotos nur mit einem iPhone gemacht worden sind. ;)

Light painting hotel interiors with a constant light.

As a photographer, it is very important to set yourself apart from other competitors, especially these days, when ordinary people purchase a camera and consider themselves a photographer. Obviously, that is far away from the truth: Spending lots of money on camera gear makes you as much a photographer, as purchasing good expensive kitchen utilities makes you a good cook. ;) But how should ordinary people know the difference? That’s why I find it very important to make my work process as transparent as possible, to exactly show my clients - who aren’t professional photographers - how I work and what to expect from me. it is easy to impress people with a crazily big amount of expensive gear. Instead, I impress my clients in a different way: e.g. “When I heard, you’re arriving by train to the shoot, I really wondered how you would fit in all your gear into your luggage.” but once they see me work, they quickly find it out that it is way more important to bring the gear you really need. They also see that I use many tools, but they are small and handy instead of big and heavy: “Wow, you really know every trick in the book! We had many photographers here, but I have never seen anyone working the way you work. Impressive!”

In this article, I am going to show you, how I use an LED-video light to light any sort of room in a luxurious hotel. To this shoot, I brought the Interfit Badger Beam 60w LED Video Lighting Monolight, with a Standard 18cm (7″) Reflector and a yellow CTO gel. The Badger Beam is a compact, light-weight and versatile 60W battery powered video & photo light that perfectly fits into my luggage to travel smart and super lightweight. With its 60 W power output, it provides a big amount of light that can be used in an ambient exposure lighting set-up, to add additional light to the ambient light emphasizing certain design elements of the room.

In this first scenario, I took two different shots:

1) An ambient shot with all interior lights turned on
2) A second shot with all interior lights turned on, including myself pointing the Badger beam light at the waterfall.

In Photoshop, I combined both images to have a perfectly lit picture, with a clearly visible and well-lit waterfall in the center of the frame that would have been way too dark without any additional light.

But not every scenario is that simple. There are way more different, more complex and more demanding scenarios in which you have to take way more single pictures. Those will all be layered in Photoshop again to create another well-lit restaurant interior photograph.

That way, I could improve the image from this basic poorly-lit shot to a well-lit interior photograph, showing all the highlights of the room in detail and in flattering light.

As we can see, it is way more important to plan your shots ahead than carrying many heavy flashes to your shoot. This way, it is much more convenient and time-saving on location as well as lighter and cheaper to light any hotel room you might run into. Layering multiple light-painted images in Photoshop also provides you with more flexibility in post-production to pick the best amount of light for each shot that you mask in to the base exposure.

4*s Relais & Châteaux Landromantik Hotel Oswald

I was recently hired to photograph this stunning hotel right in the heart of the Bavarian Forest in Kaikenried, Germany. The hotel itself is part of the exclusive club of Relais & Chateaux, a club featuring the best 500 hotels worldwide. I was hired for 6 days of photography and 7 days of retouching to finish this picture series. They already invited me twice to their hotel, the first time in December 2019 to photograph their new spa area and simultaneously, to renew their imagery of the old spa area, to have a cohesive look throughout the entire series. Being on location, my client looked me over the shoulders to see, how I work. In the end of the shoot he mentioned that I’d had really used every trick in the book to create stunning photographs: readjusting and perfectly aligning all furniture, staging the scene with neat details, wireless tethered shooting, light painting, HDR bracketing, marking the tripod legs on the floor, using flash. His appreciation for my quality of work felt really good.

Having delivered those images to my client, I felt his appreciation again as he called immediately after Christmas telling me “Matthias, your pictures are so good, I just have to book you again to take pictures of all our rooms.” So already in January I came back to do exactly that. On my arrival, the senior owner of the hotel Mr. Oswald said:

“Due to your photographs, our 4*s Relais & Châteaux Hotel gained significantly more international prestige. Since then, we receive more international bookings through Relais & Châteaux, even from Australia”

,reconfirming his utter contentment with my photography services. And even after the second shoot, everybody was truly happy to immediately upload my pictures to their website. Overall, it took 13 workdays + 4 days of travel to get these results. My client and I both know: Details matter, and it’s worth paying for them.

To get a look behind the scenes and to see me using some of the tricks in the book, I invite you to visit my Instagram story highlights “BTS and BTS Oswald”. http://instagram.com/snapshopped.

Spa area

Restaurants

Jagasitz Plus - Top of Suite

Storchennest - Top of Suite

Hirschenstein Deluxe - Top of Suite

Hirschenstein - Double room

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Photography & Retouching by Matthias Dengler - Snapshopped | Photographer in Stuttgart

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