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Genres in practice3 min read

LESSON 42

Architecture

Straight lines, deep focus, patient light.

IN THIS LESSON

  1. Accurate and pleasing
  2. Keeping verticals straight
  3. Deep focus
  4. In practice: light and time

Accurate and pleasing

Architectural photography aims at pictures of buildings and structures that are both pleasing to look at and accurate about their subject. Buildings were among photography's first subjects. The first permanent photograph, Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, was a view of rooftops, and William Henry Fox Talbot photographed a latticed window at Lacock Abbey in 1835. By the 1860s architectural photography was an established medium, and by the early 1950s architects were commissioning far more of it, which helped it be seen as an art form in its own right.

Keeping verticals straight

A central rule of the genre is perspective control: vertical lines that stay parallel instead of converging. When you tilt a camera up at a tall building, its sides lean inward and it seems to fall backward, and a wide lens makes this stronger. The fix is to keep the sensor upright, square to the ground, whatever the camera's height. Traditionally that meant a view camera, whose lens can shift up while the back stays vertical. Today it also means tilt-shift lenses on ordinary cameras, or straightening the lines afterward in software, at the cost of cropping some of the frame.

Deep focus

Like landscape work, architectural photography usually wants everything sharp, from the nearest detail to the far end of the building. That means a small aperture, a tripod, and focusing at the right distance; lesson 53 explains hyperfocal focusing. A tripod also lets you use low ISO for clean detail and long exposures inside, and keeps the camera exactly level while you check lines. Many cameras show a level in the viewfinder. Use it before every frame. Where the camera cannot go far enough back, a wider lens fits more in, but the stronger convergence it brings makes keeping the sensor upright even more important.

In practice: light and time

This section is working practice. A building's look changes through the day as the sun moves across its faces. Visit, note which side gets light when, and come back at the right hour. A facade lit at an angle shows texture; full frontal sun flattens it. For many modern buildings the blue hour works well, when the interior lights glow and the sky still has colour; lesson 33 covers it. Look for details as well as the whole: a stair, a joint, a pattern of windows. People can give scale, but place them deliberately, or wait until the frame is clear.

Try it today

  1. 01Pick a building near you and photograph it from the street with the camera tilted up.
  2. 02Step back or climb higher until you can keep the camera level, and shoot again.
  3. 03Straighten the first frame in software and note how much you lose to the crop.
  4. 04Return at another hour when the light strikes the facade at an angle.
  5. 05Make three detail frames: a material, a joint, a repeating pattern.