Photographing Buildings
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.
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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.
Here is another building in Barcelona also by the architect Antoni Gaudí, this one was nicknamed ‘La Pedrera’ by the locals which means the quarry, they didn’t like the building at first and joked that it looked like the face of a quarry.
Night Photography
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 (if you’re confused about f stops have a look at the aperture section).
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.
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Once again I’ve picked out a couple of details of the building the picture on the left shows the colour of the stone in the early morning sun. Above right I had to show a close up of these wonderfully eccentric balconies. The bottom right photo shows the same facade in daylight which, while still a stunning building, does not have the punch of the photo I took at night. You can also see, if you look carefully, that the verticals converge more in the daytime photo even though the two shots were taken from almost the same spot.
On the top of La Pedrera are these wonderful chimney tops and tops of air vents and stairwells. Although they have been there for the best part of 100 years they look almost brand new.
As with all outdoor photography you have to be there at the right time of day. We got to the building in the early evening half an hour before they closed. The guide was reluctant to let us in because we would not have time to complete the tour. “But the light will be just right for photography and that’s what most interests me.” We returned the next day for the tour which we could then enjoy with the camera packed away in its case.
Taking snaps of famous buildings is all very well but your photos, however good they are, are going to be similar to thousands of other photos of the same scene. How do you make your photos stand out or at least unique. If you are going to take photos like the top one then you might just as well buy the postcard and save yourself the trouble.
The direction of the sunlight is vitally important to your photo. These objects look vastly different as you walk around them so choose your viewpoint carefully for the best lighting effect, also watch out for clutter in the background. Watch the colour of the sky which changes as you turn around, it will be darkest at right angles to the sun. Try to allow plenty of time as the light also changes from minute to minute at the beginning and end of the day.
One way of making your photos more personal is to pose your friends and family in the foreground. When you go to any popular tourist site you see mobs of people queuing up to take such photos. This has been so overdone that it has become a tacky cliché and one of the main reasons why holiday photos can be so boring. You end up with this wonderful collection of photos of your kids in front of all the major monuments of the world. I suppose it proves that you actually went there, although in the modern age of computer retouching I’m not so sure. The more ‘artistic’ way of making the photo your own is to add a little element to the scene like the shadow in the bottom left corner of the photo on the right.
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Retouching
Here is a photo of another of Gaudí’s buildings, in fact his most famous one, the Sagrada Familia. The photo is spoiled by tower cranes which are there because, 80 years after his death and nearly 100 years after the project was started, they’re still building it!! Spanish builders have never been renowned for their speed.
A little bit of jiggery pokery in Photoshop using the ‘cloning’ tool soon rid me of the cranes (well not so soon actually, it takes time). The cloning tool is quite easy to use, basically you just select a piece of sky, make sure it’s the right colour, and copy it over the top of the crane. The trick to doing this well is to make sure you use the right size brushes with the right amount of ‘hardness’ to match the sharpness, or lack of it, in the picture. When you zoom in and look at the edges in your photo you will see that nothing is ever 100% sharp, there is always a little blur at the edges, this is what you need to match. Cloning should be done a little bit at a time so allow plenty of time and don’t get impatient to finish. After ridding myself of the cranes I used the distortion tool to stand the towers a little more upright. With the cranes gone there was too much space between the tops of the towers and the trees so I lowered the trees a little by selecting them and using the ‘move’ tool, finally tidying up the resulting line in the sky by using the cloning tool with a large soft brush.
