Photographing this interior design project by Pedro Peña Interior Design, set in a luxury villa in the prestigious La Cerquilla area of Nueva Andalucia (Marbella), called for meticulous pre-production. The aim was not only to describe the space but also to relate it to the art pieces, the furniture and the decorative elements, some produced in the studio's own artisan workshop.

On the moodboard we agreed that the feeling of each setting had to be respected, so I worked each area mainly with its own natural light. The villa's architecture made the job much easier: in the open double-height space of the living room and kitchen-dining area, connected to the outside through large windows, there was so much light that I needed no external flash. 

I used a polarizing filter to cut the reflections on the glass and keep as much information as possible from the garden and pool area, balancing the difference in brightness between inside and outside, and added a few frames with a color chart to set an accurate white balance and control the color casts.

The remaining spaces, such as the bathrooms and the bedrooms, only needed low-intensity fill flash to unify the overall light and keep consistency across the set of images from the shoot. The dusk shots document the technical lighting built into the project, part of the villa's own interior design.

We chose to work with the tightest focal length each scene allowed, moving away from the wider framing typical of real estate photography, so the viewer could read the true dimensions of the spaces and get that sense of being there, almost touching the materials.