Master-Planned Community Lifestyle Photography for Mattamy Homes

Mattamy Homes had a finished amenity center at Meridian Parks in Orlando and photographs of it. But no one was in them. Master-planned community lifestyle photography fixes that specific problem. Over 2 shoot days in the fall of 2024 I put families on the playground and around the game tables. I also went the extra mile by renting a water housing so we could capture the action in the pool. The images were used for digital marketing, print, and a wall in the sales center they were building.

Meridian Parks sits near Lake Nona. Mattamy is a production homebuilder and expects to be building there for years. Most of my commercial and advertising lifestyle campaign work is some version of this job: the company has the space, and needs the life in it.

What did Mattamy Homes need from the shoot?

Mattamy Homes needed photographs of people using the amenities at Meridian Parks, licensed for digital marketing, print, and a wall display in a sales center that was still under construction. The audience was potential homebuyers walking into that sales center.

Their marketing director sent a capture list and asked for 4-6 images of each item on it: the swimming pool, waterslide, fitness center, playground, dog park, the event space with people picnicking on the grass, and the game tables in the event center.

She also told me what she was after, and she said it better than most briefs do. She wanted buyers to feel "as if they and their families already live in the neighborhood rather than having lifeless photos."

Why do empty amenity photos fail a homebuilder?

An empty amenity photo is an architecture photo. It proves the pool exists. It says nothing about what a Saturday there feels like, which is the only thing a buyer is trying to picture.

Mattamy already had that set. Clean, correct, and inert. A tidy pool deck with no one on it looks like a listing, and nobody puts themselves through moving across town because a pool deck is tidy.

The fix is not a better angle on the same empty deck. The fix is casting the right people, then getting in the pool with them and directing until the viewer experiences what the space was built for. Relaxation and fun. That is what a commercial lifestyle photographer does for a living.

How do you make a brand-new master-planned community look lived in?

Master-planned community lifestyle photography is a cast, scheduled production. A community with no residents has no candid moments to catch, so you strategically plan them for the camera.

We booked 6 adult talent and 4 child talent through Professionally Pretty, all paid. Mattamy supplied 5 employees and their kids, which is where the pool candids came from. Hair and makeup handled the booked talent and gave the rest touchups. A wardrobe stylist shopped ahead of both days, worked on set, and handled light propping so the spaces did not read as staged.

A day and a half of pre-production went in before either shoot day, including a location scout. Then 2 days on the ground, September 25 and October 1, 2024, working out of a model townhouse as our base.

8 of us on the crew call sheet, same roster both days, with the 10 booked talent and the Mattamy families on top of that.. Carol Matlock produced. I have been building this crew for more than twenty years and it is the reason a 7-item capture list fits into 2 days.

We captured everything we needed. I ran the same shape of production on a national community brand launch for Explore by Del Webb.

Was the underwater work worth adding to the budget?

Yes, and it was the best decision on the job.

The pool at Meridian Parks has a slide and other great water features that most communities don't have. Shot from the deck, that's just a picture of a slide. Shot from in the water, it's a picture of a kid in his element with the help of Mattamy.

So I asked to add a water housing to the equipment rental. It is a real line item and it buys exactly one thing: intimacy. Their marketing director understood immediately how much better the photos would be, and Mattamy approved the cost.

I spent a good chunk of both water sessions in the water, camera inches off the surface, capturing kids and parents under the water and around the deck. The hero shots came out of a squirt gun fight (that too was planned). Two of the kids in the water are mine.

That is the same instinct behind the resort lifestyle work I did for Holiday Inn Club Vacations. Get to where the fun is happening instead of photographing it from a safe distance.

The opinion: real people do not automatically look real

Casting actual residents or actual employees does not make the pictures feel true. Direction does. Homebuilder marketers tend to resist that one.

Put 5 employees' kids in a pool with no one directing and you get a genuinely great afternoon and almost nothing you can use. Wrong side of the light, backs to camera, the good moment happening 8 feet outside the frame. The kids are real. The photograph is a mess.

The photos that read as candid are almost always directed. I set the situation, put people where the light is, give them something to do, and let the real version of it happen inside those edges. Planned spontaneity. I direct, so you do not have to.

Mattamy's mix worked because both halves were handled the same way. Booked talent and employees' families got the same direction, and in the final set you cannot tell which is which.

What did Mattamy Homes get?

30 lightly retouched images, stills only, no motion. Licensed for their digital and print marketing and for the sales center wall. No billboards, no television, which kept the usage scoped to what they were going to use.

They came back 2 years later to talk about the next round of work. For a production homebuilder who spends real money on photographers every year, that is the outcome I care about.

Questions homebuilder marketers ask before hiring

Do you need paid talent, or can we use our own people?

Both work. Booked talent gives you range, reliability and a signed release. Your own employees and their families give you faces that belong to the community. Most of my homebuilder work uses a mix.

How many amenities can you cover in a day?

A master-planned community lifestyle photography day covers 2 or 3 amenities well. At Meridian Parks a 7-item capture list at 4-6 images each took 2 shoot days plus a day and a half of pre-production. Amenity count, talent count and wardrobe changes drive that number more than anything else.

What does a shoot like this cost?

It depends on shoot days, talent, crew and how long you need the license. I wrote up what commercial photography costs in Florida with real ranges.

Can you shoot a community that is not finished yet?

Sometimes. Partially built communities usually have some sort of background construction that shows up in the shot and is too expensive to retouch out at scale. Scout it with me before you set a date.

Final Thought

Photos with nobody in them are lifeless. A buyer looks at an empty pool deck and sees a pool deck. Add a family and they see their next weekend.

If you market a master-planned community in Central Florida, this is a fixable problem. Drop me a line and let's get shootin!