Fairmont
Social Media Photography
The Brief
Fairmont's heritage hotels are among the most photographed buildings in their cities. The brand was not short on beautiful images. What it was short on was honest ones.
The recurring problem with luxury hospitality content is that it all starts to look the same: over-lit, over-staged, every frame composed to within an inch of its life and emptied of anything that feels real. It photographs the building. It misses the hotel.
The brief across the partnership was to pivot away from that. Fairmont wanted content that still held the prestige the brand is built on, but carried a pulse. Something vibrant and immediate. Something a person scrolling could actually connect with, rather than admire from a distance. And it needed to work at volume, across properties in Canada, the USA, the UK and beyond, each with its own identity, all under one brand language.
The Approach
The decision that made everything else possible: move through these properties as an observer, not a director.
No heavy crews. No artificial staging. No lighting setups blocking a lobby for three hours. I work run and gun, which on a property like this means moving the way a guest moves, just with a better eye for the moment. Natural light only. Unscripted moments only. The quiet morning light in a historic lobby before it fills. The spontaneous smile of a concierge who forgot the camera was there. The rhythmic energy of a kitchen in full swing at service.
The hero shots on this kind of work are not built, they are found. You cannot schedule the best frame of the day. You can only be in the right place, paying attention, ready for it.
The technical discipline underneath the looseness is hybrid capture: shooting high-resolution photography and cinematic vertical video in the same pass, in the same environments, without one compromising the other. That is what lets a single visit to a property produce a genuine volume of content rather than a handful of frames. The output feels immediate and relatable enough for social, while still holding the aesthetic Fairmont is known for. The two are usually treated as opposites. The whole point of this approach is that they are not.
The other layer is cultural. Operating across Vancouver, Victoria, San Francisco, London and Hamburg means every property has a different identity, a different rhythm, a different sense of itself. The work is to navigate all of that and still come back with something that reads as one coherent brand story.
"Bravo, bravo! Michelle was very happy with the material and we're officially done with this project."
Juliana
The Outcome
The partnership became an ongoing relationship rather than a single commission, which is the clearest signal that the approach worked. Each property in the program receives a consistent package of content built for the way the brand actually publishes: five reels and fifteen photos per hotel, immediate, on brand, and ready to run.
More than the deliverable count, the work shifted what Fairmont's content feels like. Less catalogue, more pulse. The properties stopped looking staged and started looking alive, which is a harder thing to photograph and a much easier thing to connect with.
Deliverables
- Cinematic Narrative-drive Reels 5 per Destination
- Stills 15 per Destination
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