Updated: Apr 17
Gil Stose Photography · Ritz-Carlton San Juan · Puerto Rico
Photographing the VISO Custom Glass Chandeliers
at the Ritz Carlton San Juan
Two monumental lighting sculptures. 250 hand-crafted glass fish. One of the most technically demanding interior photography assignments in the Caribbean. Work With Gil
There are projects where the brief is simple: get in, read the light, make great images, get out. And then there are projects where you walk into a room, look up, and realize everything you know about how to photograph a chandelier is about to be tested.
The VISO custom glass chandeliers at the Ritz Carlton San Juan were the second kind.
Installed during the hotel's multimillion-dollar renovation in 2017, these weren't decorative fixtures in the conventional sense. They were sculptures — two monumental lighting installations designed by VISO Inc., a Toronto-based lighting design and manufacturing firm, in collaboration with international interior design collective Streetsense. The goal was to bring the Caribbean landscape into the hotel's interior — specifically, the motion and light of the ocean that surrounds Isla Verde. What they built was a pair of chandeliers made from hundreds of individually hand-crafted glass fish, suspended in formation, engineered to look like a school of fish catching a ray of light through the water at the Ritz Carlton.
Photographing something like that requires a completely different approach from photographing a room. This post is about what that looked like — the technical challenges, the decisions I made, and why custom chandelier photography in a luxury hospitality environment is one of the most demanding and rewarding things I do.
The Project
VISO, Streetsense, and the Vision Behind the Installation
To understand why photographing this project was so challenging — and so interesting — you need to understand what VISO and Streetsense were trying to accomplish.
The design brief for the Ritz-Carlton renovation centered on a single idea: the hotel's surroundings are extraordinary, and the interior should reflect that. Isla Verde is defined by ocean light, marine life, and the luminous quality of the Caribbean sky. The challenge was to pull that environment into a built interior without it feeling literal or decorative in a cheap sense. The answer VISO and Streetsense arrived at was a school of fish — not a mural, not a reference, but an actual sculptural interpretation of marine life in motion, rendered in glass and light.
Two Chandeliers, Two Spaces, One Narrative
The installation comprises two distinct pieces, each occupying a different zone of the hotel's ground floor. The first chandelier, positioned in the main bar and seating area, measures 96 inches by 136 inches with a five-foot drop. It contains 100 individual abstract glass fish — 80 lamped with energy-efficient G4 LED lamps and 20 unlamped — creating a density and variation in light that mimics the way a real school of fish catches and deflects sunlight at different depths.
The second piece, larger in scale, holds 150 abstract glass fish — 120 lamped and 30 unlamped. Both installations use amber tones that transition from gold to clear, an intentional gradient that creates the illusion of a shaft of light moving through water and illuminating the school from above. Every fish is an individual glass element, hand-fabricated at VISO's production facility in Toronto. There is no standardized piece in either installation — the variation is the design.
The Engineering Behind the Art
One of the most fascinating aspects of this project, from a photographer's perspective, is how much engineering went into achieving something that looks effortless. VISO's design team spent considerable time researching the biomechanics of fish schooling behavior — how fish orient relative to each other in motion, how they cluster and disperse, how the group as a whole creates fluid visual movement even when each individual is static.
That research shaped the spacing, angle, and positioning of each glass element. The chandeliers are static objects, but they were designed to carry the visual energy of something alive. When you photograph them, you have to find the angle and the light that makes that energy visible — otherwise you just have a large glass fixture on a ceiling.
"The main goal of the Ritz-Carlton San Juan was to create a modern and elegant space reflective of the luxury property's surrounding landscape — bringing the stunning natural habitat indoors."— Jason Maringola, Design Director Interior Architecture, Streetsense
"The main goal of the Ritz-Carlton San Juan was to create a modern and elegant space reflective of the luxury property's surrounding landscape — bringing the stunning natural habitat indoors."— Jason Maringola, Design Director Interior Architecture, Streetsense
The Photography
What It Actually Takes to Photograph Custom Chandelier Installations
Most people think photographing a chandelier means pointing a camera at the ceiling. In a luxury hospitality context, with a custom art installation of this scale, it is one of the most technically demanding assignments in interior photography. Here is what was actually involved.
The Core Challenge: A Light Source That Is Also the Subject
In most interior photography, you are managing ambient light sources — windows, ceiling fixtures, lamps — as part of the background environment. You fill, balance, and sometimes suppress them to create the image you need. When the chandelier is both the primary light source in the space and the subject of the photograph, the problem inverts completely.
The VISO installations at the Ritz-Carlton are active lighting fixtures. The lamped glass fish are illuminated from within. That means the chandeliers are outputting light while you are trying to photograph them — and if you do not handle the exposure and supplementary lighting correctly, you end up with either a properly exposed room and a completely blown-out fixture, or a properly exposed fixture floating in a darkened room that looks nothing like what a guest actually experiences.
The goal was to capture both simultaneously: the chandelier glowing naturally, exactly as it looks at its intended ambient setting, within a room that reads as warm, alive, and luxurious. That requires multiple exposures, careful fill lighting that does not compete with the fixture's own output, and a significant amount of post-production compositing to arrive at a final image that looks like a single photograph of a single moment — because that is the only version that serves the client.
Reading the Amber Color Transition
One of the specific design decisions VISO made — the amber-to-clear color gradient across the glass fish — created a particular photographic challenge around white balance. The warmer, gold-toned elements at the center of each installation read differently under camera than they do to the human eye, which adapts dynamically to the shift in color temperature across the piece.
Getting the amber tones to reproduce accurately — warm and rich without crossing into orange, clear without going cold — required shooting across multiple color temperature settings and making deliberate choices in post about which color profile served the installation's design intent most faithfully. The benchmark I held myself to was simple: does this image show what VISO built? If the answer was yes, we were in the right place.
Finding the Angles That Show Movement in a Static Object
The greatest challenge with photographing a school-of-fish installation is that you are trying to show motion in something that does not move. The illusion of movement in the VISO chandeliers is entirely compositional — it exists in the spacing, the orientation of individual glass elements, and the depth of the installation. From certain angles it reads clearly. From others, you lose it completely and are left with what looks like a grid of hanging objects.
The shooting position for each hero image required a significant amount of exploration. I needed angles that captured the depth of the installation — its three-dimensionality, the way elements in the foreground differed in density and illumination from those further back — while also showing enough of the surrounding space to give the viewer a sense of scale. A chandelier that is eight feet across is meaningless in a photograph if there is no architectural context to establish what eight feet feels like in that room.
Shooting Windows in a Luxury Hotel
One practical reality of luxury hospitality interior photography that rarely gets discussed: you are not always in control of the space. Hotels operate continuously. The Ritz-Carlton San Juan is a working property with guests, staff, food and beverage service, and ambient noise that does not stop because there is a photography assignment in progress.
The shooting windows for this project were carefully coordinated with the hotel's operations team. Early morning slots gave us the clearest ambient light conditions before the bar and lobby filled with activity. We worked fast and we worked systematically — establishing shots first, then architectural detail, then the close-in fixture work that required the most precise lighting control. Planning that sequence carefully is the difference between a productive shoot and one where you spend half your time waiting for conditions that never quite come back.
About the VISO Installation
Chandelier 1 — Main Bar and Seating Area
96" × 136" · 5-foot drop · 100 individual glass fish (80 lamped, 20 unlamped) · G4 LED lamps · Amber-to-clear gradient
Chandelier 2 — Lobby Area
150 individual glass fish (120 lamped, 30 unlamped) · G4 LED lamps · Gold-to-clear color transition
Design by VISO Inc., Toronto · Interior Architecture by Streetsense
Photography by Gil Stose Photography · Published on Archilovers
Why It Matters
What Custom Lighting Photography Means for Designers and Lighting Brands
The VISO Ritz-Carlton project is a good example of a category of work that does not always get named clearly: photography for custom fabricated lighting installations. It sits at the intersection of architectural photography, product photography, and interior photography, and it requires fluency in all three to do well.
For a lighting design firm like VISO, the images from a completed installation are the primary marketing asset. The piece itself exists in one location, seen by a fraction of the potential clients who could commission the next project. The photography is what travels — to trade publications, to the firm's website and portfolio, to award submissions, to the design media. Bad photographs of exceptional work produce no business. Good photographs of exceptional work can produce years of it.
What Lighting Brands Need From Their Photography
When I photograph a custom lighting installation for a manufacturer or design firm, the deliverables need to work across several different contexts simultaneously. The wide-angle installation shot establishes scale and spatial context — it shows editors and clients what the piece looks like in its environment, which tells them whether it would work in their environment. The mid-range architectural shot shows the integration between the lighting design and the surrounding architecture. The detail images isolate specific elements — in VISO's case, the individual glass fish, the color gradations, the way the LED source renders the amber glass at close range.
Each of those image types has a different technical requirement, a different lighting setup, and a different post-production workflow. Planning for all of them in a single shoot requires the same kind of pre-shoot conversation I have with every design client: what do you need these images to accomplish, and in what context will they be used?
For Interior Designers: Lighting Is the Most Difficult Part of Any Project to Photograph
If you are an interior designer reading this, lighting is almost certainly the element of your projects that suffers most in photography you do yourself or commission from general-purpose photographers. The reason is exactly what I described above: a fixture that is both the light source and the subject creates an exposure problem that most photographers are not set up to solve. They either give you a beautiful room with a washed-out chandelier, or a beautifully rendered fixture floating in a dark space that looks nothing like what your client sees when they walk in.
If lighting is a significant element of any project you want to submit for editorial consideration — whether it is a bespoke installation like the VISO pieces, a statement fixture from a luxury brand, or a carefully planned layered lighting scheme — that element needs a photographer who understands the technical reality of what they are looking at and knows how to solve it before the shoot begins.
Puerto Rico & The Caribbean
Hospitality Photography in the Caribbean — What Makes It Different
The Ritz-Carlton San Juan sits in Isla Verde, one of the most competitive luxury hospitality markets in the Caribbean. The guests who stay there arrive with high expectations formed by five-star experiences in New York, Miami, London, and Dubai. The photography that supports a property at that level has to meet those expectations in every frame — no corner-cutting, no good-enough.
Working in Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean comes with its own set of practical considerations that photographers based on the mainland do not always account for. The quality of natural light in the tropics is fundamentally different from what you encounter in, say, Atlanta or Philadelphia — the intensity is greater, the color temperature shifts more dramatically across the day, and the transition from usable interior ambient light to harsh midday conditions is much faster. You learn to move earlier, plan tighter, and read the light with a different calibration.
A Long-Term Relationship With Puerto Rico and the Caribbean
The Ritz-Carlton project is part of a body of hospitality work I have built in Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean over many years. I serve as the official Caribbean photographer for Airbnb Luxe and hold FAA Part 107 certification for commercial drone operations, which means projects that require both ground-level interior work and aerial documentation can be handled in a single engagement without switching photographers or production teams.
That local knowledge and Caribbean credentialing matters to hospitality brands operating in the region. The difference between a photographer who works here regularly and one who flies in for a single assignment is the difference between images that feel like they belong to a place and images that could have been taken anywhere.
You can see more of my hospitality and interior photography work across the Caribbean and the U.S. in the interiors portfolio and the tearsheets and editorial placements section of the site.
Ritz-Carlton San JuanVISO Inc.Custom Chandelier PhotographyLuxury Hotel InteriorsPuerto RicoStreetsenseArchitectural PhotographyCaribbean PhotographyHospitality Photography
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Related Work and Resources
The VISO Ritz-Carlton project is documented on Archilovers as part of VISO Inc.'s project portfolio. You can read more about the design intent and engineering process directly on VISO's project page.
To explore more of my hospitality and Caribbean interior work:
Interiors Portfolio · Editorial Tearsheets & Publications · Architectural Photography · Kitchen & Bath Photography
Photographing Luxury Hospitality Interiors Across the U.S. and Caribbean
Custom installations, landmark hotels, luxury residences. 30+ years of editorial and commercial experience. FAA Part 107 certified. Official Caribbean photographer for Airbnb Luxe.
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[email protected] · (828) 506-9376 · @gilstosephoto