Designs on Architecture

One of my 2012 goals is to determine if I can hold my own photographing buildings. Architectural photography, done well, presents some of the most interesting and striking images around. I'm not into photographic trickery, like high-dynamic-range images and substantial levels of image retouching. As art, extensive retouching has its place. But photo editing also robs people of the ability to learn photographic fundamentals and can make people worse photographers. For some of these photos, though, I needed to use Photoshop to correct some gear deficiencies. For instance, I do not own a tilt or tilt-shift lens. To accommodate this absence in my gear case, I used Photoshop's perspective control function to keystone some of the building shots below. I'll note that as a percentage next to the image capture data.


1/60th, f5.6, 35%. In order to prevent the perspective control from cropping the building top, I increased the canvas size about 15% in each direction and then distorted the image. A small rotation correction, as much as allowable without subject loss. This corrected some unevenness amplified by the distortion process. Lesson learned: photograph straight-on.


1/60th, f5.6, 8%. Hotel Vitale. Also increased the red and yellow saturations about 15% or 10% and dropped the blue and cyan saturations about 35%.


1/125th at f3.5. Digital monochrome conversion. In order to make this image turn out properly -- the sky was much brighter than the bus, -- I metered the bus and held the exposure lock button until taking the above shot.


1/640th, f5.3. Also used a wand mask, feathered to 18, on the bird. Dropped the bird mask and increased the exposure on that layer. Then dropped the offset on the back layer minorly and flattened the image.


1/320th, f11.


1/50th, f5.3, 24%. Let's end this post big with an above average reflection capture.

So here are a few lessons from this outing:
1- For building shots, to minimize distortion during perspective control processing, stand far back.
2- Leave space around the subject within the frame to minimize subject loss following perspective correction.