Hotel Room Pictures

[SJD]

Hi,

I own a hotel and i need your opinion to pick the best lens to take pictures. The hotel rooms are quite small so using my kit lens with 18mm the pictures that i take mostly be very small part of the room and it does not reflect the size of the room (i want to at least show what we offer).

I have attached one such picture. Also the bathrooms are just 24 sq ft so taking pictures of those will be even more challenging.

Please suggest the best possible lenses and also most quality-cost ratio ones as i may not be able to spend so much on them.

 

[SteveH]

To fit more in, you need a wider lens than the 18-55mm... So anything less than 18mm focal length. Be aware that the wider you go, the more distortion you may get (How much depends on the make and model of lens) also, prices rise quite sharply as you go below 18mm.
You could look at the Nikkor 10-24mm, and also the 3rd party manufacturers equivalents (Tamron , Sigma etc)

 

[Marcel]

What you have to do is turn your camera in vertical mode, start taking pictures on one side and keep shooting to create a panorama of pictures that you will then merge to create one picture. You can find many tutorials on the web about "panorama, stitching" etc. Some brands of cameras offer this as an advanced mode and you can create pictures just by pressing shutter and moving the camera from one side to the other while the camera takes as many pictures as needed and then you end up with a final jpeg picture.

 

[SteveH]

Marcel's idea is much better than mine, do that SJD!

 

[aroy]

I have shot a lot of interiors of houses under construction. No lense is wide enough to take up a medium sized room. So panorama stitching is your only recourse.

Here are two examples of toilets each about 6 x 5 feet. Stitched using Microsoft product. Please note in this case I wanted only plumbing, but you can have the floor also





Some kitchen shots - 6 x 10 feet.




Let the quality not fool you. These are pictures taken and processed for speed. When you do it for advertisement literature, you will be a bit more careful of exposure and coverage. These are cell phone pictures. With any DSLR you will get much crisper images and processed carefully they cannot be distinguished from those taken with a very wide angle lense (only distortion will not be there!)

 

[gqtuazon]

I would suggest an ultra wide angle lens such as the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8.

Looking at some of the hotels that we stayed in the Philippines during our vacation, these were taken with a 24-70mm f2.8 lens at 24mm which is the equivalent of 16mm on a DX. I hope this will help a bit.

 

[Geoffc]

Here is my take on it. I took these when we decorated to email to my wife so they are really snap shots. I had the Tokina 11-16 available to me but chose to use her 10.5mm fisheye. The Tokina is very good but just not this wide. With the 10.5mm fisheye you can stand in the corner of a room and photograph all of it bar the two feet or so where you are standing. It then needs correcting in lightroom or similar. The bedroom is around 3x3m and the bathroom is approx 1.7x3m. As it's a bit specialised it's probably better to hire a fisheye. It costs $38 for four days from lensrentals. You will need the software to straighten everything up though.