A 45 Metre Ceiling Over 40,000 m²: Photographing a Logistics Warehouse in the Madrid Corridor

Client: French visual production agency, commissioned by the asset owner
Industry: Logistics Real Estate / Industrial Property
Scope: Ground and Aerial Photography, Brief Led Documentation, RAW Delivery
Location: Henares logistics corridor, Madrid region, Spain

The Project

A logistics warehouse of roughly 40,000 m² beside the A2, in the corridor that carries most of Madrid’s distribution capacity. The building is a leased asset: several operators occupy it, one unit stood vacant on the day of the ground shoot, and the party who needed the photographs was none of them. It was the owner.

The commission reached us through a French production agency working for that owner. They had a portfolio of buildings to document and a house look already established across it. What they wanted from Madrid was a set of frames that would drop into that portfolio without looking like a different photographer had taken them.

That framing decided almost everything about how the job was run.

The Brief

Around forty to fifty images, interior and exterior, ground and aerial. A written brief arrived as a reference deck, slide by slide, showing the angles the owner expected: the full footprint, the dock faces on both sides of the building, the road access and its relationship to the motorway, and closer frames of the operating floor.

Two instructions in that deck mattered more than the rest.

The first was that the deck was not a mood board. It was a specification, and the images had to answer it slide for slide.

The second was the delivery format. Every file was to be handed over as an unprocessed RAW. The agency would do its own post-production so that this building would match the others in the set.

The Challenge

Restricted airspace over the whole site

The location sits inside a military control zone and also falls under airport regulation. On a site like this a drone flight is not a decision taken on the morning of the shoot. We flagged the airspace on the first day of the enquiry, before quoting, and advised filing at least two weeks ahead.

The approval that came back carried a hard altitude ceiling of 45 metres and a defined operating radius.

Forty five metres is low for a building of this footprint. It is the difference between standing back and taking the whole thing in one frame, and having to construct that same impression from a sequence of passes.

Birds

The Henares corridor is raptor country. Common buzzards and red kites hold territory along it, and on the day of the flight they engaged the aircraft repeatedly, diving at it through most of the session.

For stills this is manageable. The drone can be placed, the frame taken and the position vacated inside a few seconds. For continuous video passes it is not manageable at all, because a clean orbit needs an uninterrupted flight path and there was no stretch of sky where one could be flown.

December light and a live building

The ground work fell in December, which in Madrid means a short list of usable days and rain on most of the others. The warehouse was also working. Lorries were at the docks, order pickers were moving, and none of it was going to stop for a photographer.

Movement, without owning the decision about it

The owner wanted the building to look alive rather than staged. Long exposure treatment was mentioned. But the agency, not us, was doing the post, so any motion effect baked into a file would have removed a choice that belonged to them.

Our Approach

Two visits instead of one

We proposed splitting the production. Ground photography would go ahead on the first clear December window, and the aerial work would wait until the permits were properly in place.

That decision cost us a second travel day and it was the right call twice over. It let the ground set be shot in good light instead of being held hostage to airspace paperwork, and it gave us a scouting visit before the flight, so the aerial day started with the positions already known.

Diagonal passes instead of an orbit

Under a 45 metre ceiling and a fixed radius, the whole building will not fit in a single frame from any legal position. So it was covered as a set: diagonal passes carrying the full footprint, both dock faces, and the yard with its road connection out to the motorway, plus closer frames flown from the sectors where the birds were not engaging.

The coverage the brief asked for is there. It is assembled from angles rather than taken from one, and that was the only shape it could take inside the approval we held.

Shot to someone else’s plan

Working to a reference deck is a different discipline from working to your own eye. Each slide was treated as a frame to be matched, and the sequence on site followed the sequence in the deck rather than the sequence that happened to be convenient. The dock faces on both sides, singled out in the brief, were shot as a pair so they could be read against each other.

Activity in frame, decisions left open

Rather than baking in long exposures, we made sure every frame that could carry movement did carry it: a forklift crossing the floor, an operator at the controls, vehicles at the bays. Delivered as RAW, each of those frames still holds the full choice of how far to take the motion, and that choice stayed with the agency doing the grade.

Mixed light inside

The interior runs on high bay lighting with daylight coming through roof lights and open dock doors, which is three sources with three different colour temperatures falling on the same concrete. Exposures were placed to hold the roof structure and the floor together, so the neutral point could still be set in post without the shadows falling apart.

Selected Work