About Mike Butler - Architectural Photographer

I’ve spent 30+ years photographing architecture and hospitality, most of it at a tier where a mediocre frame isn’t an option — luxury hotels, resorts, and architectural icons. As a Hilton Luxury approved photographer, I’ve worked with top names like Waldorf Astoria and Conrad, on properties where the brand book is thick and the standard is absolute.

Hospitality Design named me one of the Top Architectural Photographers working. Brickell Magazine put me on their Top 20 Under 40, and I’ve been listed among the Top Creatives in Miami. My work has been featured on HGTV and in design press. Those are nice. What actually matters to a client is what those years bought: judgment.

Anyone can own the gear. What you can’t acquire in a few years is the ability to walk onto a property, read the light, and know immediately what the shot needs, then deliver it while the sun moves, the suite turns over at four, and the schedule compresses around you. Any light, any style, whatever the property calls for. Ground-based and drone-mounted lighting, often in the same window, sometimes solo when the day demands it.

I also work in video, running full productions as director and director of photography — big crews, talent, timelines. I direct it, and I still get my own hands in it to make sure it happens.

Photography got into me in Thailand. I lived there in high school, shooting black and white, rolling my own film, processing it, printing it. I learned on the streets of Bangkok, which is a texture rich, generous place to learn: everything moving, light doing whatever it wants, no second chances on a frame. That’s where I cut my teeth, and I’ve never lost the love of it. 

The work I’m proudest of, I paid for myself. Rogelio Salmona’s Virgilio Barco Library in Bogotá had never been lit and photographed the way I knew it could be, so I funded the entire project and did it. No client, no fee. It became a major exhibition at Parque 93, and the subject of La Foto, a short film I produced and directed. El Tiempo and Caracol Noticias covered it, Canal Capital interviewed me about it, and Rangefinder featured the project. I made it as a gift to a building that deserved it, and it taught me something no commercial shoot could: a building is only ever half the story.

From 2010 to 2016 I co-founded and led the Elastic Mind Project in Barrio Codito, Bogotá, working with kids in marginalized communities on creativity and critical thinking.

What I bring past the pictures is ownership. I take responsibility for the shoot. There’s always a solution, it may not be the one anyone wanted, but there’s always one, and I find it before I bring you a problem. If the shot is happening on the far side of the resort, you’ll see me run for it. I’m fifty-two and in the best shape of my career.

No bad frames. That’s the standard.

Based in Raleigh and Miami. Available worldwide.

Let’s talk. Whether your project is in Raleigh, Miami, or anywhere else, reach out and tell me what you’re building