Pure Senses: a month of spa photography and video in Cromwell

Pure Senses is a new day spa at Mount Pisa, near Cromwell, with a lot going on under one roof: a Finnish sauna, an infrared cabin, relaxation spaces, and The Reset Studio, which runs a traditional Yume Japanese head spa. Since the start of September we have been their spa photography and video crew, and the work has grown every week.

This is a round-up of what we have delivered so far, and what is coming next. If you want the detail of how the first day was shot, including the light, the camera and the problems, that is all in our Pure Senses case study.

Day one: the hero frame and a magazine spread

The first shoot was on Thursday 3 September. We were outside the building at 6am, before sunrise, for the exterior at the top of this page. Those few minutes are when the sky and the warm interior lights sit close enough together to hold both in one frame, so the building reads as open and lit rather than as a dark box against a bright sky.

That image was made for a double-page spread in the Spring 2026 issue of QT Magazine. A spread is a bigger print job than most people expect. The page is 480mm wide before bleed, so a file that looks huge on a screen can still fall short of print quality. We supplied the final at 5800 pixels wide, taken from the 4:3 frame so it could fill both pages at 300dpi, and sent back layout options so the fold did not cut through the entrance.

The interior stills that day were shot by photographer Kirsten Summers, working alongside us. We looked after the exterior, the video and the behind the scenes.

The behind the scenes reel

The clip above came out of the same day. It was shot vertically in 4K, so it runs at full resolution on Instagram and TikTok instead of being cropped out of a wide frame. It shows the part of a spa shoot most people never see: small rooms, low coloured light, and a lot of waiting for a room to settle before anything is worth recording.

For a business like Pure Senses, that kind of reel often works harder on social than a polished ad. It shows real people in the real rooms, which is what someone deciding whether to book actually wants to see. It is the same thinking behind our social media video work.

The yoga session

We went back on 8 September to shoot a yoga class in the late afternoon. The room is not large, so we shot the whole session on a 10mm lens, which on our Sony FX30 works out at roughly 15mm in full-frame terms. That width lets you see the room and the class together, rather than a row of cropped bodies.

We kept 59 frames from the session and graded them to sit alongside the photos from the first shoot, which were brighter and warmer than the yoga light on the day. That matching matters more than any single frame. A spa's website puts these images side by side, and if one set runs cooler or darker than the other, it starts to look like two different businesses. The first edited set went to the team two days later.

Print work for The Reset Studio

Not every job is a camera job. The Reset Studio, the head spa inside Pure Senses, had two pieces of print artwork bounced by their printers: a DL advertising card and a glossy tri-fold brochure. The card had a front and back at different sizes with no bleed. The brochure's panels were all the same width, when a tri-fold needs each panel a couple of millimetres narrower than the last so it folds shut cleanly.

We rebuilt both to the printers' specs so they could go to press. It is not glamorous work, but it is the kind of problem that can stall a small business for a week, and it goes faster when the person fixing the files also understands the images in them.

What the client said

Pure Senses left us a five-star Google review after the first round of work. The line we keep coming back to: "He came at all hours of the day and night to capture the right light, the right atmosphere and all the feels!" That is the 6am start, and it is fair. You can read the rest of our client feedback on our reviews page.

More shoots on the way

We are back at Pure Senses on Thursday 1 October to shoot their new ice bath, with a model and the spa's yoga teacher leading the session as the trainer. The stills will be edited, colour graded and delivered through a private gallery, along with a vertical reel that is ready to post the same week.

And it will not stop there. As the spa adds new spaces and services, the plan is to keep shooting them as they open, so the website and social feeds grow with the business instead of getting one big refresh a year. That is how we like to work on branded content around Central Otago: a steady run of shoots, each one matched to the last.

If you run a spa, a studio or any business around Queenstown and Central Otago and want images and video that look the way the place feels, tell us what you have in mind.