Architecture Photography Tips

No question, buying a camera and learning
how to use it has been one of the best investments I think I've ever made. Photography is one of the meta skills I think
every creative person has to cultivate, you know, it teaches you about light, and composition,
contrast, color; all these things that are linked to our experience of, not only architecture,
but the world. I think it's helped me see the world more
objectively, you know viewing it through the lens of a camera, it's just a really valuable
skill set to have in your toolkit. So, I'm not a professional architectural photographer
but I've learned a few things having shot a lot of architecture over my professional
career.

So I wanted to share with you some of the
mistakes that I made when I was first starting out so you don't have to make them to. One of the underlying style elements of architectural
photography is maintaining parallel lines in your image and especially parallel vertical
lines. So to achieve this you have to keep the focal
plane which is basically your camera sensor in here perpendicular to the ground plane. Now, once you tilt the camera you start to
introduce a forced perspective in your image which creates converging lines rather than
parallel lines and it also tends to make the building look as though it's falling backward,
which can admittedly be a good thing if it's exaggerated or that's the effect that you're
going for, but if it's just subtly off it's sort of a tell that you're an amateur.

So the pros use tilt shift lenses for perspective
control which allows them to physically move the lens by tilting and shifting it. Now this corrects the distortion right in
the camera it bakes it into the image. But those types of lenses come at a really
steep price. You can also correct for this in programs
like Lightroom Photoshop or even Snapseed on your phone.

Once you get used to correcting for it you'll
probably start to notice it everywhere. Now correcting this in Lightroom is really
simple and I'll show you how. Okay here we are in Lightroom I have this
photo of this church in Quebec City and I'm just going to show you how to correct the
verticals. We're in the develop module I'm not going
to go through any of - all of - these settings at this point I'm just going to keep those
as they are.

And I'll go to the transform panel here and
you'll see I'm off level and also my verticals are converging. So there's a couple of ways to do this: the
first way is just to choose auto and that's gonna make its best guess and you can see
here it's corrected our verticals. If we come over here to the grid our verticals
look pretty good there still converging just a little bit and then our horizontals, it's
pretty close again. The other way you can do this is you can choose
purely vertical.

So here it looks like it corrected our verticals
a little better, you can also choose level which doesn't look like it did a very good
job. The vertical looks good but the horizontals
here look a little tweaked. Now the other possible way that you can do
is guided and so we'll choose a couple of verticals here - you pick your vertical lines
in the image - and you can be as precise as you want to be here I'm just getting it roughly
close. And then we'll choose our horizontals like
this, you can see it gives you a zoom box so that really pops it into place.

And if you had more horizontal lines - I don't
have a lot of horizontal lines here that I. Can work with - but if you had more you could
adjust this with more granularity. One last thing I want to mention and this
is sort of a compromise solution because when you're doing this it's modifying the pixels
so it is destructive in some sense. That is the compromise when you use a tool
like Lightroom or even Snapseeds tool it will distort the image and the pixels in it.

So you'll want to plan for this because you're
gonna have to crop the image in crop it in like this. You're losing a bunch of information on the
sides which is fine actually because I think it actually just focuses on the subject of
the photo even more. White balance has a big influence on the feel
of your image whether that's warm or cool and it can be tricky to get right if you're
mixing light between inside and outside. Now this is another thing that once you start
correcting for it in your images you'll start to notice when people don't white balance
their images.

So you've probably seen the classic white
balance mistake where an interior has a really orange or yellow or green cast to it. So daylight, incandescent light, and LED lighting
they all have different color temperatures and they each introduce a different color
cast into your image. So changing the white balance allows you to
correct for this and it allows you to choose which one represents the scene most accurately. So I sort of view it as an artistic decision
in my workflow as I'm editing the image in post.

Shooting your images in a RAW format will
give you the most flexibility to change things in post but you can modify white balance even
if you're not shooting RAW. If you're shooting on your phone just hop
into an app like Snapseed and give it check what the auto white balance feature does for
your image you might be surprised how much more polished it starts to look. Using a tripod rather than hand-holding your
shots allows you to push your camera's manual settings exactly where you need them, say
that's a long exposure for a low-light environment, or to focus stack, or to blend multiple exposures
of a scene to capture a higher dynamic range. Let's say you're shooting an interior room
which has a window with lots of exterior light coming in.

If you were to expose for the interior the
window area would be just way overexposed overblown. And if you were to expose for the exterior
- for the window - the interior would just be way under exposed. So professionals will usually expose for the
window and bring the light level up inside to compensate with supplemental lighting like
strobes. But if you're lacking that kind of professional
gear - and you probably are since you're watching this - you can simply lock off your camera
on a tripod and take a series of multiple exposures.

You're going to bracket the same scene and
then combine those bracketed images in Lightroom or Photoshop to capture a broader dynamic
range for that scene and a more accurate rendition of how the eye actually experiences the architecture;
that's what you're after. Now I mentioned tilt-shift lenses as the standard
go-to for serious architectural photographers but most of us don't have the budget for those
they're in the multiple thousands of dollars. Most commonly you're going to want to use
wider angle lenses for architecture but if you go too wide you'll get lots of distortion
it's just not gonna look right. For interiors and tight spaces I'm usually
using the 16 to 35 which is a zoom lens and that's on a full-frame Canon 6d mark 2 now
if you're using a crop sensor like a 70 or an 80D you can pick up this 10 to 18 zoom
for not a lot of money and for those cameras the crop sensors it covers roughly the same
focal range like 16 to 28 millimeters so still fairly wide.

Now, I also have a 24 to 70 zoom for longer
focal lengths longer focal lengths tend to compress or flatten the image bringing the
foreground and the background closer together. Many phone cameras just have a fixed focal
length I think the iPhone that I have is about a fixed 28 millimeter so not too wide but
it's not too bad either so if its all you have that's what you can use. And there's also a host of sort of lenses
that you can clip onto the top so if you don't have the budget for a DSLR, check out Moment
lenses for some good options. Having a zoom lens for architecture is nice
because much of the time you'll be working with some kind of space constraint, having
the zoom function allows you to reframe and change perspective; a fixed focal length wouldn't
allow you to do that.

Ultra-wide shots can appear unnatural so you
don't want to capture only ultra-wide shots, save those for when you're not able to get
back far enough or you just don't have another option. Use these to help tell the story of the larger
building: materials, intersections, joints, these are all the touch points of architecture
and I like to use the 50 millimeter 1.4 For detail shots. It's fast enough to create some nice background
blur which isolates your subject and it means you can hand hold these detail shots and kind
of move quickly from one thing to the next you know pick up handrail, fittings, fixtures,
materials, connections; capture all the things that lend context, texture, and interest to
your work. The more you shoot the more you'll gain an
intuitive understanding of how light affects your final image.

Backlighting, front lighting, side lighting,
and night lighting, all produce vastly different effects. Now I try to avoid really flat lighting situations
where there's an even amount of light on the subject coming especially from the direction
you're shooting from now this doesn't allow you to capture any shadow or texture because
you're aligning your view with the light source so you're not going to see any of the shadows. You want to move around a space or outside
a building and get a real feel for what light is available and you want to always be aware
of your aspect in relation to it. Position yourself in a way that tells the
true story of how the architecture is influenced by and how it changes in varying light conditions.

Now this is an important one you want to get
rid of everything you possibly can especially in interior spaces and really focus in on
your subject. If your shot is of a workspace there's actually
very few things you need to tell the story of that space: computer, keyboard, chair,
desk; you know that's probably it you want to take out everything else. Now when you take the shot have a peek at
it on a larger screen if possible and you really want to scrutinize it, it's completely
possible you forgot to remove something obvious in the frame, like I've left the lenses on
shelves before or there's been a tripod in the back corner that I missed until I looked
at the image on a separate screen. Now these are just a few tips to get you started
and they'll go a long way to helping your images look more professional especially the
first two, focus on those if you don't know where else to start.

But all of this is in no way a substitute
for working with a professional architectural photographer, they have better equipment,
training, and they have connections to publications which you probably lack. Now having the skill of knowing how to use
a camera and what all the manual settings do is really useful because it can be a long
time between when a project is completed and when you're able to professionally photograph
it and it's nice to have some high quality images you can use in the interim. And often the detailed photos that you take
on your own - as you're on the site, the things are finishing up - leaves flexibility in your
photography budget for the person you hire to capture scenes and perspectives that you're
not able to get because of your equipment limitations. Now links to all the gear are in the description
below and they're linked up in the cards go ahead and smash that like button below and
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camera are you using? We'll see you again next time, cheers my friends!.