Photography of highland estates

One of my highland estate clients is having a new web site designed so they need to refresh the photography. First up is to photograph 2 of the 3 main holiday let accommodations that they have. The  previous photographer just took basic snap shots of empty rooms, with a holiday home that has no personal stuff around like photographs or paintings this looks dull and dreary so I decided to try and create a desirable lifestyle around the properties. We dragged in some models to add a sense of dimension to the properties.

The first home is quite  a large one that is often rented out by large groups, catering is provided by an on site cook so we planned a dinner party.

I started off in the sitting room, we got the fire going, got the models to pretend to be playing games and relaxing. The idea is to make this desirable and make potential clients relate to the people and picture themselves in the houses, rather than just photographs of empty rooms.


It was a lovely large room and the temptation was to get the wide angle lens out and make it look even better but creating stage sets was definitely the right thing to do.

Again, this photograph could be taken anywhere but I wanted to create a sense of place, you can just imagine a long day in the hills coming back to this roaring fire and chocolate cake.




And, just to give the web designer a choice,  a different point of focus.


After that we moved to the dining room, this is a huge room and can seat 12 round a table, it’s a lovely room and decorated like a real highland mansion but the colours are the worst to photograph, GREEN!!!! So, once again we set a lifestyle shot with the models we had available and we served dinner. The soup was cold and the rolls frozen!

I wanted to create a sense of movement here so got the dinner guests to sit still and got the waitress to move fast – easy. The lighting was difficult, very directional light from the window, the sun was out and shining right in. I had to balance the sun with a Bowens flash head to the camera left but that gave me an issue with the movement I was creating so this is actually rear curtain sync – if you ‘re interested.

 

To create a a sense of night time we just closed the curtains!



We finished off here then moved on the the other property, this one was much smaller, more of a gamekeepers cottage with a view to die for, pity the sky was dark, I’ll have to return for that shot. This was a bland property so again I went down the lifestyle route and we got the sofas pulled round the fire and found a lovely dog to pose for us. 





The 1st of a 3 day job, I love these jobs, out and about in the countryside – what could be better.