How to photograph buildings

10 Jan 2002 - from http://www.ephotozine.com/

How to photograph buildings - We live in them, we work in them, and most of us sleep in them. But what about photographing buildings?

How to photograph buildings
We live in them, we work in them, and most of us sleep in them. But what about photographing buildings? Any one who has a camera has probably taking a picture of a castle, local church or tourist monument, but buildings offer much more scope from the intricate details of historical cathedral or the graphical shapes of modern architecture. We take most of the buildings around us for granted and with a little extra perception youll start to see a whole new way at looking at architecture and its many forms.What gear do you need? Any camera from a single-use to a sophisticated SLR is capable of recording a decent picture of a building. Ideally you will often need a wide-angle lens but if you do have a fixed option look around for viewpoints where you can get the whole building in shot. Walking back up the road away from the interesting architecture or stepping across the courtyard will give you the necessary space. Or you could play up the strengths of your fixed lens camera and move in close on smaller areas of the building. SLR users who invest in a wide-angle lens or those with a compact with a zoom lens can open up far more options. With a wide-angle you can fill the frame from close range and take shots when you normally wouldnt be able to, such as in a narrow street or from a confined viewpoint.


When using a wide angle you will find that walls of a tall building lean inwards when you shoot from a low angle. This can be prevented by using a special lens known as a shift lens to correct the perspective problems, but a less costly way is to find a distant viewpoint and use a longer lens or from close range if you can gain height by climbing a nearby hill or shoot from the upstairs window of a building opposite that will help. Specialist architectural photographers take step ladders with them to gain the height. Ideally you want to a viewpoint that positions you about halfway up the building any higher and the bottom of the building will start to slope inwards. These correction problems can also be sorted out using the transform tool of an image-editing program, which weve covered in a previous tutorial. You may, however, want to exaggerate the sloping walls, as I did in the above example, by shooting wide and going low. The alternative end of the spectrum is to use a long lens to home in on small details such as gargoyles on a church or an interesting carving in its masonry.

What film?

Slow speed film with fine grain will ensure you record all the subtle details in a building. This will ensure you record all the detail so you will be able to read any plaques or display boards, as well as see all the intricate carvings. As most of your pictures will be outdoors and the subject is static you can usually get away with using ISO film, which has very fine grain. You may prefer to try black & white and if so adding an orange filter to your kit will ensure that the brickwork is recorded with superb tonal range and the sky behind will be saturated with white clouds against the dark blue background sky.

If you venture inside youll need a tripod to avoid camera shake especially with church interiors that are often dimly lit. In brighter buildings lit by fluorescent or tungsten lighting you will need a filter when shooting using colour film. A tungsten (household type lamp or reflector type) will add an orange cast and needs an 80B blue filter to correct the colour, while a fluorescent strip lighting will introduce a green cast and needs AN FL-D magenta filter to correct the problem. If you have a digital camera the cameras automatic white balance control should sort out the colour. If not switch to manual and key in the appropriate setting, checking the LCD preview to see the effect.


Exposure


Photographing buildings is one of the easier subjects to measure the light from. In most cases the brick or stone is a similar tonal value to mid grey so the meter will record it accurately. Problems will generally only occur if the material used is very dark (coated glass) or very light (white painted structures) In these cases the camera will compensate making a dark building to light and a light building too dark. Open up a stop or close down one stop to compensate. So, for example, if the exposure you get is 1/30sec at f/8 when shooting a dark building select 1/60sec at f/8 or 1/30sec at f/11. If its 1/250sec at f/8 when shooting a white building, select 1/125sec at f/8 or 1/250sec at f/5.6. If your camera has exposure compensation set either 1stop or +1 stop respectively.


If you have an auto exposure lock point at your hand (if its in the same light as the building) and lock the exposure.One other area that can fool the camera is when the sun is behind the building and in the frame. The bright area will fool the camera into setting a shorter exposure and the building will become silhouetted. Point down so just the building is in the shot, take a reading and recompose using manual or the auto exposure lock.
They say a picture paints a thousand words so now lets look at some practical examples of techniques you can try.


A telephoto lens can also be used to create dramatic patterns by filling the frame with a repetitive brick structure, modern glass building fascia or tiled rooftops. Shoot from an oblique angle and the perspective will change dramatically creating lines disappearing towards a vanishing point

Left: A 200mm telephoto shot of the houses of parliament building in London. Most pictures you see of these famous buildings show the whole structure. By cropping in tightly you can highlight the fantastic repetitive detail and make an interesting pattern.

Right: The 80mm end of a 28-80mm zoom was used here to crop in on these modern apartments in the Canary Islands. I made use of the rule of thirds (see previous article on composition) placing the wall and blue railing on the intersecting lines.
Above: Use am arch or tree to provide a natural frame around your picture.

Left: In this shot at Fotheringhay I walked down into a dip in the field that had a huge puddle and positioned myself to get a reflection of the impressive church. This adds impact to a shot that could have ended up being a typical horizontal view of the church.

You don't have to shoot in colour all the time. Black & white makes an often more dramatic alternative. This shot of a plain looking building has been improved by shooting on infrared. Here I used a digital camera and enhanced the result using Photoshop to darken the sky, increase the glowing areas of the foliage and added a sepia tone.

You are often allowed to climb up to the rooftops of churches or cathedrals and doing so present many photographic opportunities. As well as gaining you a great viewpoint of the city you can often find interesting statues projecting out from the walls. This shot taken at the Duomo in Milan. Just one of its 3500 statues to choose from!

Night Photography of Buildings

by Geoff Lawrence

Photographing buildings at night raises new problems but can produce great images. The first problem is that there is a lot less light so holding the camera steady can be a problem. The best way is to use a tripod but I couldn't fit one in my suitcase so I had to find another way. One good way to give yourself extra support is to lean against a tree or sturdy lamp post, bracing yourself in this way and locking your arms tight into your body can get you a reasonably sharp exposure at 1/15 sec or even down to 1/4 sec. Another even better method is to brace the camera against a signpost or sturdy support such as a wall. If you are sitting at a cafe you can often get good shots by placing the camera on the table. I was doing this a few days ago, using a book under the lens to adjust the height and got sharp pictures at very slow shutter speeds.

The other problem with night photography is the very high contrast of the scene, this can send your automatic metering system into a complete frenzy. If you have mastered the art of bracketing exposures on your camera I would suggest that this is a good time to use it. The idea of bracketing is that you take one exposure at the 'correct' setting according to the light meter and then you take one or more at higher or lower readings. Most of the better cameras these days will have a special knob for doing this so you don't have to resort to manual exposure. Just click the wheel to +1, +2 or -1, -2 etc. The big question is which settings to use and how finely tuned do your different exposures have to be. A professional shooting in the studio will bracket his exposures 1/3 of a stop apart, but you or I looking at the results might not be able to see the difference between one shot and another. A whole stop on the other hand might be too much - see Aperture.

In a night scene you are inevitably going to have quite a lot of black and there will usually be light sources in the scene which will normally be burned out white, at least in the centre, so the object of bracketing is to control the highlights so they don't get too out of hand. As you can see in the photo above there are halos around the lights but they are, in my opinion, under control. There are no rules about how big your halos should be, it's up to you, but massive blobs of white in the picture can look pretty ugly. Normally I would not recommend a highlight near the edge of the picture as this can lead the eye out of the frame, however I tried this photo with and without the street lamp on the left and decided to leave it in. Rules are there to be broken but it's nice to know you're breaking them.
from www.geofflawrence.com

Photographing Buildings

by Geoff Lawrence

The Right Light
If you prefer to go on sightseeing holidays rather than flopping on a beach then you're probably going to want to take photos of the buildings you visit. The trouble is you're always there at the wrong time of day, the light is coming from the wrong direction, there are crowds of people blocking your view and the rest of the family are nagging you to put the camera away and get moving. You could just buy the postcard but, if you are a photography junkie like me, that will never be an option. Although sometimes I might buy a postcard as an insurance policy in case my photos are not good enough.
The best time of day to take photos of any outdoor subject is either the early morning or the evening when the sunlight has a reddish hue and the light is coming from the side rather than directly overhead. Early morning is best, there is a difference in the quality of light that I find it hard to put my finger on, also there are normally less people around. Obviously if you are photographing buildings the best time of day is going to be dictated by which way the building is facing. The photo on the right was taken at about 7.30am, I had spotted the building the day before but the light was all wrong so, as it was close to the hotel where I was staying I decided to go back in the morning.
As with any other type of photography you should ask yourself what it is about this particular building that you like and focus on that. Sometimes this will mean framing the whole building, sometimes it will mean picking out details and sometimes a mixture of both will work well. In the photo above it was the tower on top of the building that caught my eye but I found that I needed at least some of the building to give the tower context.

Framing
When photographing buildings, especially the tops, you often end up with lots of boring sky so a good trick is to frame the top of the building with a branch or two from a nearby tree. I was quite lucky with this shot the trees were there waiting for me, all I had to do was go and stand in the right place, but I would not be above dropping in a branch from another photo using a bit of Photoshop magic. Looking around for a tree before you take the photo though will always be more convincing and with zoom lenses it is easy enough to adjust your perspective to fit everything into the right place. It can be hard to get the scale and the lighting just right when you try to put the tree in afterwards.

Getting the perspective right
All the photos on this page were taken on a holiday trip to Barcelona where, amongst other delights, we wanted to see the work of the architect Antoni Gaudí. The photo on the left is of a building that was reworked by him in the 1920s. This building is quite difficult to photograph because the trees that line the roadside get in the way. I wanted a shot of the whole facade and the only way I was going to get it, without chopping the tree down, was a drastic tilt of the camera. In this instance the look is quite dramatic and the use of a wide angle lens makes the building look as though it is bending over backwards. Whenever you tilt the lens upwards to get the top of the building into the picture you will notice that the sides of the building converge towards the top and the building appears to be leaning over backwards. In a shot like this one it doesn't really matter but, if you want your buildings to be upright, and personally I hate to see photos of buildings where the verticals are slightly off, then you either have to shoot from a higher vantage point or you need to employ a little trickery.
In the bad old days of film the best option was a special 'anamorphic' or shift lens which would correct the verticals for you. There was also an option to correct the perspective in the darkroom by tilting the enlarger at an angle but in the modern world we use the 'perspective' or 'distort' adjustment in Photoshop to spread out the top of the picture until the verticals are once again vertical.

If you have ever tried to do this to one of your photos and found the adjustment greyed out as unavailable, the probable reason is that you are trying to apply the adjustment to the background layer which will not work. If you double click on the layer in the 'layers' palette you get the option to rename the layer and the default option is 'layer 0' click yes to this and the layer will no longer be the background and all the perspective adjustments will work.

Here are three more photos of the same building, in the shot on the right I have corrected the verticals in Photoshop by stretching out the top of the picture. This seems to work remarkably well considering the programme must have to insert pixels into your picture to make up the size. I suppose a purist would not stretch the top but shrink the bottom and then crop the sides.
Normally when I am out and about I carry two zoom lenses, a mid-range which covers approximately 28-80mm (in old fashioned 35mm terms, now 18-55mm) and a 75-300mm telephoto. This covers me from moderate wide angle to about as much telephoto as it is sensible to handle without a tripod. The two pictures on the left are details from the facade showing the 'bits that I like' picked out with the telephoto lens.

from www.geofflawrence.com