Room, spa, restaurant: a hotel is three commissions in one

This is the most constrained bank and the least spectacular. A room has to read: you must understand its size, where the bed sits, what the window looks onto. The traveller looking at it wants information, not emotion.

Booking platforms add their own framing and aspect rules, and they crop without warning. An image made for them therefore keeps margin around the subject, precisely where a magazine image would go looking for the edge.

It is also the bank that ages fastest. Change the furniture, replace a fabric, and the photograph becomes untrue. That is worth weighing when the licence duration is set.

A press image has a different fate: it may run full page, sometimes across a spread, in a publication that did not commission it. So it has to hold at a size where everything shows, corners included.

In practice that moves the work: tighter perspectives, straight verticals, a depth of field that does not leave a corner of the room soft. Those are slower frames, and there are fewer of them.

It is also the bank where rights come up earliest, since the image will travel outside the hotel’s control. What a licence covers is set out on the image licensing page.

The third bank consumes the most and lasts the least. It wants vertical, detail, movement, frames that would not survive a full page but work in a feed.

It also has subjects the other two ignore: the breakfast gesture, a hand on a handle, a robe over the back of a chair. They are the cheapest images to produce and the fastest to exhaust.

The classic mistake is to crop them out of the website bank. It works once. Three months later everything looks alike, because a website bank was never built for that rhythm.

The three banks are not shot at the same hour, nor at the same density. A room for the website is made in steady, held light; the same room for social is made when the light is low and the place looks lived in.

If the split is not made beforehand, it gets made afterwards by cropping, and it gets made badly. Or it gets redone on a second shoot day, which means paying twice for what could have been planned once.

That is why, before quoting, I ask what the images will do rather than how many rooms there are. Hotel commissions are set out on the hospitality photography page, and their Paris version on hotel photographer in Paris.

The moment a figure becomes identifiable — a guest, a staff member, someone passing in a corridor — the photograph is no longer freely releasable. Written authorisation is needed, and it is collected on site, not three months later.

It is a tiny administrative constraint that blocks entire campaigns when forgotten. On my productions, an image in which a person is recognisable enters no distribution channel until that authorisation is confirmed.

Most of the time the fix is photographic rather than legal: from behind, in movement, against the light. A human presence makes a room feel lived in without anyone needing to be identified.