How much does interior photography cost?

There is no separate cheaper rate for interiors. The same two things drive the fee: how many finished retouched images you need, and how long the photographer is on site. My rates are £700 for up to 20 images with up to three hours, and £1,200 for up to 40 with up to six.

If anything, interiors are the more demanding half of the job technically, which is why the idea that they should cost less rarely survives contact with a real shoot.

Outdoors you largely take the light you are given and choose your moment. Indoors you manage it. Every room is a negotiation between the daylight coming through the windows, the artificial lighting in the ceiling, and the enormous difference between the two, often several stops of brightness apart, which usually means shooting a bracketed set of exposures and blending them afterwards rather than relying on one frame to hold both the room and the view.

Then there is the tidying. Almost every interior frame involves moving something: a chair, a bin, a cable, a stack of paper. It is slow, and it is why a room that looks simple can take forty minutes.

Take a small showroom or reception with three or four connected spaces, fifteen final images, a morning slot. That sits comfortably inside the £700 package, up to 20 images with up to three hours on site.

Most of that time goes into a smaller number of considered setups rather than many quick frames: a wide of each space, one or two details per room, and perhaps a shot toward the entrance that captures the sequence of arrival. Each setup usually means tidying the immediate area, levelling the camera, and shooting a bracketed exposure to hold both the room and any window view. Afterwards, those fifteen frames go through culling, exposure blending, colour correction across whatever mix of daylight and artificial light was in the room, and perspective correction, which for a considered interior set often takes longer overall than the time spent shooting.

Number of rooms. The clearest driver. Ten spaces is a longer day than three, regardless of how large each one is.

Styling. If the space needs dressing, someone has to do it, and that time is part of the day whether it is the photographer or your team.

Difficult lighting. Mixed light sources, very dark rooms, or spaces where nothing can be switched off all add time, both on site and in the retouching that follows.

People in frame. Arranging, briefing, and photographing people naturally takes longer than an empty room, and is usually worth it.

The retouching included as standard in a package covers the base work every interior frame needs: blending the bracketed exposures, correcting perspective so verticals are parallel, and balancing colour across the room's actual light sources. That is not optional finishing on an interior, it is the minimum required to make the frame usable at all.

Heavy retouching, billed separately at £50 an hour, covers everything beyond that baseline: removing objects that could not be cleared on the day, extensive cleanup of a busy or cluttered room, or combining elements from several frames into one composite. Knowing which category a room falls into before the shoot, simple and tidy versus complex and busy, is the easiest way to avoid a surprise on the final invoice.