The hills have guys
There is a knack to show-home photography. You’re dealing with a house that has been styled with high end furnishings and accessories for viewings rather than photographic opportunities. There are always things to remove, and the exteriors are always adorned with marketing banners. The garage is inevitably a marketing office fitted with glass doors rather than garage doors, and the temperature inside them is never less than several thousand degrees.
When shooting them for estate agents, the images will be unscrupulously used by the builders themselves – saving hundreds or thousands of pounds at your expense, and in order to keep working you have to shut up and put up with it. Copyright is a dirty word to every single company involved in marketing property, and I have images out there that have been stolen by estate agents and unashamedly credited to themselves (with a copyright notice helping themselves to the glory!) in order to sell multi-million pound properties. Unbelievable.
Anyway, this one was a luxury development from Robertsons Homes built in the shadow of the Simonside Hills on the bank leading down to Rothbury. To be fair, they’d had their own shots done for marketing, although I was a bit disappointed with how much sheer ceiling the shots featured, and come on mate…..retouch yourself out of the bloomin’ TV screen reflection.
The exteriors were a bit disappointing at ground level, so I opted for elevated views to show the context of the surroundings. The turf at the front had been laid on wet soil, so it moved in a wave-like movement when you walked on it. The fun began inside.
Nobody had told me that this was the official launch day for the development, and there would be scores of people in the house, eating buffet food, drinking champagne, and milling about everywhere. Local council bods, estate agents, property developers, potential buyers, the management, and even the Duke of Northumberland at some point. I’m supposed to set up and shoot a show home devoid of people, with thirty people in the house itself! God almighty.
The kitchen was being used as the base for the event, and was completely full of food and drink. An impossibility basically. I had to rearrange another visit a few days later to get this one finished. Meanwhile, I worked around the people in the house to get everything done one bit at a time. Some of the frames had folks standing with glasses in hand, so I was forced to merge multiple shots and mask the people out afterwards.
I had to adopt a mindset of assuming there was nobody there, and just keep my cool – working the harder parts first, then moving on to the easier upstairs rooms which didn’t have people moving around.
I finished with a good few detail shots of the specification, and cameos showing coffee pots and wine glasses etc. The Duke didn’t turn up, and neither did the MD of the agency I was working for. My brief had included some PR shots of the execs of the developer and the estate agents, so I got everybody together for the handshake shots. Unbeknown to me, there had been a bit of a corporate falling out of the aforementioned parties after I got the brief, so I inadvertently captured some of the most awkward press shots in history. It was like Trump and Putin pretending to get along at some summit or other. This job does have it’s lighter moments.
