A fleet of boats in Phang Nga Bay: working as unit still photographer on The White Lotus 3
At six in the morning in Phang Nga Bay the humidity is already at ninety per cent and it feels like forty-three degrees. The sun is still veiled but the air has the weight of something solid, and within an hour it opens up and becomes the condition you will be reckoning with for the rest of the day. I am on the set of The White Lotus 3, the third season of the HBO series, as unit still photographer, and this is the first thing you learn: the set does not wait. The first genuinely useful thing I learned from the Thai crew was to wear the sleeves the local fishermen use to protect themselves from the sun. A practical detail, but when you are working eight hours on a tender out at sea, every discovery like that becomes part of your method.
That day was the first of a run of days at sea, shooting the yacht scenes for The White Lotus 3. As unit still photographer my job was to document the production from the inside: the scenes during filming, the moments between takes, the production machine in motion. All the material that then goes to press, to promotional use, to the official HBO archives.
A set that moves on water
The production of The White Lotus 3 was spread between Phuket and Koh Samui over several months, with locations changing every day and conditions changing every hour. The interiors at the Four Seasons in Koh Samui were controlled, the light predictable, the set static. The exteriors at sea were the opposite.
For the yacht scenes the production put a fleet in the water: the main yacht (the one you see in the series), boats for the director and the monitors, support tenders shuttling back and forth with crew, water, food and equipment. All of it coordinated by radio. For safety reasons only a few people at a time could be aboard the yacht, so there was a standby boat holding the crew all day and a constant flow of tenders moving whoever was needed wherever they were needed.
Phang Nga Bay is where The Man with the Golden Gun was shot in 1974, with Roger Moore. Limestone rocks rising vertically out of green water, visibility for kilometres, light that changes colour every fifteen minutes. It is not a place that needs improving. It only needs looking at.
The rhythm of the sea: how you shoot on water on a television production
A set out at sea has a rhythm unlike any other. There are the moments of total concentration during filming and then long pauses between setups where almost nothing happens. In those moments the still photographer’s work does not stop, it changes subject: the bay, the crew, the human context around the production. Somebody was asleep on the yacht deck, somebody was working, somebody was talking. One of the crew had brought a kit for casting jewellery by the lost wax technique. People who work in film live something like circus life, that set is their family, they know each other through spending practically every waking hour together for months. Telling those moments is as much a part of the job as covering the scenes.
The cast photograph and the three to five minutes that count
The photograph with the whole cast on the beach is a ritual, done for every season of the series. On this third season it fell to me. It was Mike White who told production it had to be done. The assistant directors bring the actors to the set and hold umbrellas over them so they do not burn, but arriving with them are the costume and make-up teams, who have to check that everything is working. You have roughly three to five minutes to orchestrate the positions and take the right frames, and then the moment is gone.
These are the moments where you have to be a sniper. Nerve, control, concentration. The same speed of reading needed in those minutes with an international cast on a beach in Thailand is the speed needed on a food set when daylight comes through a window and you have twenty minutes before it changes. The context is completely different. The mental mechanism is the same.
What a unit still photographer learns from a production like The White Lotus
Working on international productions at this level changes the way you think about the image. Not because smaller productions are less interesting (they are often more so, there is less distance between the person deciding and the person doing it), but because the scale forces you to develop the ability to work well in conditions you do not control. The light is what it is and it changes while you are shooting. You cannot reposition anything beyond a certain point. You have to read what is happening in real time and decide quickly. It is a kind of technical improvisation that you build only by doing it, and that you then carry into every project afterwards.
In the end what an experience like this teaches, beyond the technical skills and the familiarity with production standards you will not find elsewhere, is something simple: trust the process. Accept that control is always partial, and that the ability to adapt to conditions counts for more than the ability to predict them. It affects every job I do now, whatever the scale.
The White Lotus 3 aired in February 2025, became the most watched season of the series with an average of more than twelve million viewers per episode, received twenty-three Emmy nominations, and a fourth season is already confirmed on the French Riviera. Koh Samui saw a sixty-five per cent rise in bookings after it went out. Those are numbers that give an idea of the scale of what we were building, even if in the moment the only number that counts is how many minutes you have before the light changes. You can see more of this work in my Cinema & Editorial portfolio.