Back in 1981 I started working for Early American Life Magazine and spent three or four years packing my old pick-up truck with 2000 watt Norman Strobe boxes, heavy duty flash heads, yards and yards of heavy extension cords, A Calumet 4x5 inch view camera, three view camera lenses, 30 four by five inch film holders, a huge tripod, light stands and all the other support gear needed to make large format, architectural images on transparency film, and make it work inside houses and buildings, as well as for exteriors. It was quite a load.
On a typical job my art director would fly in from Harrisburg, PA. I'd pick her up at the Austin airport in my giant light blue Chevrolet truck and we'd head off to our various locations for the better part of a week at a time. On a typical job I might shoot eight to ten set-ups a day on the big camera along with some detail shots on medium format film. I'd bracket each exposure in half stops over a plus and minus two stop range. I'd come home with somewhere close to 200 sheets of 4x5 inch sheet film that I'd take to the lab in tranches...just in case something went wrong in the processing. When the film came back I would edit the results down to two good exposures per set up, divid those into two batches and send each batch separately, via Fedex, to my client back in Pennsylvania. You never really wanted to throw the dice and send the whole take at once because, even then, things went astray occasionally.
I continued to do large format architecture photos, as a side gig to my mainstream portrait, work all through the 1980s and early 1990s. We used the big camera and big film to do brochures for medical centers (including lifestyle shots on large format), hotels, resorts, law offices, and new buildings for architects and construction companies. Eventually I got more and more event and portrait work and that, at the time, was a lot more fun so some of the original momentum of my architecture work wore off and I moved the business in a different direction. I also met a local photographer who had much more passion for photographing inanimate objects/buildings that I ever would and as a result he was also better at it than me. I more or less surrendered my little corner of that discipline to him.
Last Fall I was making portraits in various locations around a spanking new office in a swanky new high rise in downtown and having a lot of fun. Light came in from walls of floor to ceiling windows that wrapped around the client's entire floor. The portrait project went well and a week or so later I got a call from the same client asking me if I could do an interior architecture shoot of their new space. Since I knew them to be a nearly perfect client I was happy to accept.
The entire job was done with a Leica SL2-S camera and I chose it because it has a ridiculously wide dynamic range and its high ISO performance means it can provide very, very clean shadow areas when used at lower ISOs. I made use of the built in perspective control feature for every frame. The finishing touch was getting the raw files into Lightroom to open the shadows and tame any highlights that needed taming. One or two images were made by taking a light and dark version of the same shot and blending them in post production. It worked very well.
We did fifteen different set-ups over the course of a couple hours, all with one camera, two lenses and a decent tripod. So much different from the film days....
I'll gladly go back to making interior shots if clients want them. I'd forgotten how much fun it can be. I just hope all the potential clients have brand new spaces and have spent good money on interior design because that's the real secret (if there is one) of great architectural photography.
The images chosen by the client have had the skies adjusted. But just a little bit...
I'm envious! I really miss doing that work.
ReplyDeleteThose offices need a few more green plants as accents. Was the plant in the last photo at the end of the room already there or did you place it?
ReplyDeleteI absolutely hate plants in offices. Hate em. But clients and designers like them because they seem to fill in corner spaces. I would never, ever bring in a plant as a prop on my own volition. I try to get rid of them when I can.... So, yes, that plant was already there. My prejudice against greenery probably comes from the film days when transparency films had an especially hard time rendering greens correctly. Too often the greens of plants turned into a mushy brown and always went at least a stop darker than the surrounding surfaces. And, pre-PhotoShop, burning and dodging wasn't really an option for transparency films...
DeleteNice! What lens did you use for the wide angles? I'd guess 24mm on the wide end?
ReplyDeleteHi Terry! I used the Leica 24-90mm Vario for everything. It's a really nice lens and I found myself mostly at 28-35mm. Too wide doesn't work for me but in a pinch I keep the Sigma 20mm f2.8 in the bag. It's a nice lens as well but requires vignette corrections. Thanks for asking.
DeleteI was recently browsing photo sites online and saw architectural shots like yours from another professional, but the buildings outside the shooting site were very soft, almost fuzzy. How'd you keep respectable sharpness both in the distant buildings and your client's offices? Tight apertures and long exposures?
ReplyDeleteDo you do much sharpening in Lightroom (or Lightroom Classic?)
Hi John, With 35mm sized sensors and wider angle lenses (24,28,35mm) I find an aperture of f8 works to give me a deep depth of field. Many photographers who depend on AF tend to focus on the closest object to the camera and depend on depth of field to cover a truncated range of stuff. Reading the depth of field scale is enlightening. On an SL2 or SL2-S you can set a lens to MF, hold the shutter button halfway down and the little window on top of the camera will tell you you closest distance, actual focused distance and maximum distance that will be in focus, calculated using the lens on the camera and the set aperture. Most people focus too close. Finding the right compromise is the way to go.
ReplyDeleteSome still bemoan cameras with too much technology and I understand the sentiment. But what you just described, determining those distances at the push of a button, is precisely the kind of thing that computers excel at and it makes good sense to use the computing power in that way.
DeleteThis post resonates with me. It reminds of scene in the documentary Visual Acoustics where Julius Shulman says: "Let the architects do all the heavy work."
ReplyDelete