PHOTOGRAPHING ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 มี.ค. 2023
- Architectural details are a vital part of your overall documentation of a project.
A great detail photograph can be the one iconic, memorable image that represents the entire project.
Purchase my e-book "Architectural Photography and Composition" here
www.stevenbrookephotography.com/
A Complete Guide to the History, Practice and Techniques of Architectural Photography and Composition.
360 pages, over 300 photographs contained in this e-book.
Everything you need to start your own architectural photography practice or master your existing skillset.
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#architecturephotography - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
inspiring and informative as usual Steven. Thank you
Great information!
Thank you, Mike,
Exceptional! Thankyou, needed some inspiration today!
Glad to have been able to provide some ;)
Thanks Steven ❤️ another banger on the books ❤️
Thank you.
Steven this is a great topic. I read John Varriano's "Italian Baroque and Rococo Architecture" pretty often--he used an epic detail photo for the cover like you describe in the video, but few detail images in the book itself. It might have helped the readers a bit!
John and I went to the University of Michigan together. He was one of my best friends; he passed away several years ago. He wrote a wonderful essay for my "Views of Rome" book on the history of the depiction of Rome.
Thank you! An interesting topic! I think the architect should pay a lot of attention to the detail, because in fact, the detail is often crucial to the overall effect. It's nice when the photographer can recognize that and appreciate it photographically. The fashion of the magazines, however, to present architecture primarily in this detail pictures tending towards the abstract, leads away from the essence of architecture, I think, which lies in the concrete, life-oriented use, embedded in the surroundings and society. The latter are - by the tendency - unfortunately excluded.
I agree with you. I, too, have seen magazine coverage of architecture that concentrated primarily on the detail views at the expense of overall and context views. Clearly, both perspectives are necessary to thoroughly document the architecture. Also, the specific sequence of overall views and details is very important for my presentation of my work to my client.
@steven brooke Yes, both perspectives are necessary. The fact that this sometimes remains so one-sidedly unnoticed indicates to me a fundamental conflict: The laws of photography, and especially those of magazines, are different from those of architecture. Here in Europe, where the urban context is often very strong and architecture really should be an ensemble art, the conflict sometimes is quite obvious. Here, the photogenic object is often actually irrelevant to the built environment - or even harmful, because it steps out of the ensemble. I therefore sometimes jokingly say: If a building makes a good picture, it could be an indication that it is bad architecture. ;)
Unfortunately, the photographer becomes part of a false incentive system, which the architect then also likes to succumb to, in which he primarily builds not for the client and society, but for his photographically presented portfolio.
Do you know what I mean?
@@friedhelf Thank you again, Friedhelf, for your thoughtful comments.
Yes, I understand you completely. I have had clients who literally design their architecture for how it will look when photographed. In the best of situations, however, this can result in architecture and interiors that are better designed, better proportioned, and more thoughtfully sited and accessorized.
I am grateful for this understanding because, as I am certain others have discovered, it is much more difficult to photograph architecture that is badly proportioned, poorly sited, and/or indifferently accessorized. And for the record, I have turned down many projects because they were either just badly designed or, increasingly more common, urbanistically irresponsible.
My best friend, the award-winning interior designer Dennis Jenkins, was particularly aware of how a project would photograph. His design decisions, always spot on, always photographed beautifully. The architect and designer Suzanne Martinson, who clearly understands how a camera sees, insisted that new employees accompany me on a photography session. She believed that seeing how the three-dimensional world translates into two dimensions by a skilled architectural photographer provides insights into design issues that are often overlooked, particularly for interior design. Out-of-scale furniture, artwork, accessories, etc, which, in person, your eye might overlook or which may possibly look ok in a drawing, leap off the frame when photographed. Attending the photographic sessions was, for her employees, truly eye-opening (and exhausting) and ultimately helped them in their design decisions.
Architects and designers are clearly caught between the need to produce thoughtful, responsive architecture and the necessity to have that work photographed and published. As you point out, current shelter and architecture magazines hold significant sway over the style and focus of documentation that they will publish. For the record, I find this recent direction to be questionable at best.
@@stevenbrookephotography Thank you! That is extremely interesting, Steve. You have clients who send their young architects out with you. Fine architects and smart employers they must be. I congratulate you on such clients (and good, that your are independent enough to be able to choose them) Ah..., so many exciting question this raises. For example, the relationship between being and appearing in architecture, between Alberti and Vitruvius, if you like.
I don't want to be a nuisance here with this sort of thing, but since I've noticed that you do go after the fundamental in your work, it would certainly be a pleasure to learn from your take on it. Perhaps something you might address en passant in an upcoming video - and you probably already have.
I had the pleasure of teaching architectural design (or "Entwerfen", which differs, I guess) for a few years. Especially for the interior I worked a lot with photographs, which served as templates, for quite elaborate paper models, which in turn had to be photographed again. A terrible process for the students, demanding and laborious, but a very good school for perceiving light and perspective and materiality and spatiality and abstraction and what not... They gifted themselves with images, some of them of really extraordinary quality, which not only made them grow professionally, but also made their portfolio stand out from the mass of computer renderings - at least that's my humble conviction ;)
And by the way, this brings up another aspect from which current architectural production receives influences that may not always be to its advantage, I am afraid - and this also in respect to the detail. Wouldn't you argee that the current process logic of CAD leads away from the well thought out and culturally anchored detail? Today we have an architecture that often sees its highest quality criterion in the absence of detail. German offers a nice Word for this: "Detialarmut" - the poverty of Detail. The vectorial click-click on the one hand and the graphic potential of photography on the other hand may at least have their share in this. Media influences those really are.
... but I'm sorry, I'm getting into the chatter ...
> Maybe not a bad thing. There is a principle in Ethology, developed by the German biologist Konrad Lorenz, discussing the process of avian imprinting, that directly equates the difficulty of effort for the newborns following the parent with the ultimate strength of the learned habit. Hard fought equals hard won equals lasting benefit.
As for AUTOCAD vs drawing: I am not an architect, but I know this still seems to be a contentious issue in architectural practice. There are veteran architects I know, trained before the dominance of CAD, who still prefer the direct -- albeit more tedious --process of drawing by hand. They claim the process to be more directly engaging, more thoughtful, less ‘automatic’, whether or not they are minimalists who eschew excessive detail or surface ornament. I know other young architects who feel about CAD the way I feel about digital photography: they have produced drawings by hand (a bit like shooting on film) but much prefer the facility and ease of manipulation of CAD (like digital photography). For a large architecture or engineering office working on multi-story buildings with repetitive floor plans, the ease of distribution and amending of CAD drawings is simply a must.
There is, I suppose, a similar polemic in recorded music: the spontaneity and sense of adventure of one-take ensemble playing (like Miles Davis’s epic “Kind of Blue” album) or live performances, versus the layering of separate tracks, recorded at different times, to produce one master track (a lot of recorded music now).
In the end, as with any art, the goal is to use any and all available equipment and tools in service of producing the most responsive and elevated works. (David Hockney’s books have convinced me that Vermeer (and others) used some form of camera obscura as a perspective aid; yet, he still produced brilliant works of arresting sensitivity.) The sheer ease of digital production - CAD drawing or digital photography - makes it all the more incumbent on the artist to avoid the facile in favor of the contemplative.
Great movie. Please more videos.
Thank you, Karol. More coming. Many will be in response to the most frequent questions I am getting from our community. I very much appreciate the interest.
Great video! I have a Zoom 24-105 F4 G lens Sony and will use it for detailed shots on 65-100 range 😊
I think you'll find that it will work perfectly. Remember that the longer focal lengths have a narrower depth of field. That may mean using a smaller f/stop to keep everything in focus.
@steven brooke Perfect, thanks for the information 👍
How are you shooting raw on iphone? Great video, thanks for the inspiration!
Depending on your phone version: Go through the SETTINGS for CAMERA. Under FORMAT, look for a toggle for RAW or PRO RAW and activate it.
👍👏😍
Thank you for the lecture, I like your stile. Have you a lecture on Infrastructure photo?
Thank you for your note, Thomas. If by 'infrastructure' you are perhaps referring to more industrial projects, let me say that the basic principles of composition are the same as for any project. Actually, industrial facilities --factories, laboratories, transportation complexes, etc, - tend to be more dense, more complicated than say, a residence. Axial compositions are very helpful in organizing all that activity, as I showed in my latest video. Please let me know if this does not answer your questions satisfactorily. S
@@stevenbrookephotography Thank you for your feedback. I think you explained it to me. Have you a lecture photographic narrative? Or combining pictures after a script? There is the National Geographic method but I think it’s a bit limited. Infrastructure and a documentary style of narrative can be a method that works.
I take the phrase ‘photographic narrative’ literally, in particular with people in the images. If there are two or more people, there should be some kind of tacit dialogue between them to aid in the overall structure of the composition. I discuss this in my video “Placing People in Your Architectural Photographs.” Vermeer and de Hooch, in particular, do this in their paintings, and their methods are worth studying.
Architects use this term in a broader context: they consider the “dialogue” or “narrative” between a structure and its surroundings to be critical to the overall design solution. It is therefore very important for an architectural photographer to make that relationship as clear as possible. I try to show this in my video on my photography of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, as the relationships -the narratives - between the structures and the landscape were of paramount importance to Mr. Johnson.
In my video on “Sequencing” I try to discuss the importance of the order in which you assemble your images for your client. In a way, I do have a “script” in my mind as to how I am going to present this project to people who may only know it through the photographs. I learned a great deal from Gale Steves, the brilliant editor-in-chief of “Home Magazine”, who always came to a project with an actual script to which we shot.
I hope this answers your questions to some degree.
There is now a video on Industrial Photography that I think you will find of interest.
As you talk about Iphone photrography, it would be interesting topic for another video :)
Can we use smartphones to achieve pro works ? On computer, the details of smartphones looks so bad compared to all dynamic range of a big camera. Your point of view would be interesting :)
Thanks for your videos, love it.
Jim, Please check out my video on how to take successful architectural photographs with your iPhone. It is definitely possible if you shoot in RAW format (not JPEG), use a tripod, and a remote shutter release. Sharpening with a program like Topaz Sharpen AI will improve them even more. th-cam.com/video/xTvXS1b8juE/w-d-xo.html