Long time no read – my apologies, dear photographers. But here comes a longer read on which I worked hard during the last weeks. I am sure you wondered how many of those architecture close-ups in shiny photography books and magazines have been created. Those photographers sense special perspectives, they feel how architecture shows its most spectacular side. To dive into architecture photography I thought I’d take you for a walk through London, which offers a diverse set of buildings to try very different styles and – most important – this will help you find your personal style.
Speaking of style: you will see, I guess, that many of those shots have a similar tone, colouring, look, perspective… which might all together be the basis for a so-called „photography style“. When starting to use your camera to do more than just snapshots and after having a look through several photography websites and guides, you will wonder sooner or later how photographers decide their style for pictures. The good news is: they don’t decide, they just do, they just shoot and after doing this over and over again they finally feel like they found their own style in photography. The bad news: this will take a lot of time and you’ll collect an high amount of frustration scenarios. Be patient, it’ll work out.
Let’s have a look on the picture above which shows the „W“ hotel in the centre of London, entering Leicester square from the South, and another fascinating building in the front which contains a Lego and a tea-shop by the way… I honestly love this picture, it’s one of my favourite architecture shots and I am proud of it. It’s not really a demanding photo challenge, but I’d guess only few photographers would have done it right. But what did I think when composing this picture? It began with a problem: the sky was so blue. Blue sky is beautiful, for sure, when inviting for a barbecue, hiking through the mountains or enjoying a swim. But for most photographical issues it is a bad thing because you simply get what it is: a blue sky – boring, unicoloured. Given this challenge, I still wanted to shoot the right front building because I liked what it looked like with the mirrored sky in the windows and the straight lines, pillars and well-structured stone. But no matter which perspective I chose and tried, it never worked out properly, even with a wide-angle lens using 10 mm minimal focal length. And as I tried some different settings, I found out that my lens (starting at f/3.5) would not use enough light to properly work out the mirrored sky and buildings in the windows. So I switched back to my standard lens (24-70) and tried something different: I used the spectacular „W“ building as background and started the composition at a higher spot, showing only half of the buildings, just the top sections. Combined with the blue sky which mirrors in both buildings (especially the one at the front) and the mirrored ancient building top on the very right window (can you spot it?) it gives you the feeling of a post-modern age scenario, bringing past and future building styles together, showing different architecture styles in one photo. And if you are in London, by chance, just visit Leicester Square and try to spot the same angle as I used. You will see that this place is crowded day and night, having different tourist shops (ugly!) and China Town influence in the North, which is interesting, but not fitting into this composition. You can use innovative angles to show and create scenes that do only exist for people with a special sense for photos. It is worth practising this, trust me. Good luck! I am looking forward to your thoughts and compositions.
The next shot is obviously showing the same „W“ building, but with a different angle and different settings for the camera. I used f/4.5 because I realised that too much light would destroy the building structure by being too aggressive. So I closed the aperture a little more than on the first photo above. This shot is definitely worse than the first one, it is simple, well-composed, it’s suitable for being a background for ppt-presentations or similar use-cases, but not a delightful piece of art. Nevertheless, I wanted to share few thoughts about it and give you the chance for a comparison between both pictures: what makes the first one so much better is (beside many small details, but we’ll focus on the „big“ picture here) the unique angle. The second „W“ picture is not spectacular because everyone who visits the building (and the M&M store inside) watches it from this very angle. Sometimes it makes sense to shoot pictures of obvious things; in this case, the creativity beats the obvious.
You announced a walk through London…shall we walk?
I keep my promises, so let’s have a look at the „Queen’s walk“ which is a pedestrian area between Tower Bridge in the East and London Bridge in the West. The city hall building is one of the most beautiful buildings in London, but not shown on the picture because I will reveal this in another „night photography“ article arriving later this year.
I used open aperture and a wide angle to cover this buildings without exaggerating the dramatic wide angle effect by using ultra-wide lenses. As the building details are important I wanted to keep the ISO low. During daytime this should not be a problem at all without a tripod; for night shots, of course, you should bring one with you. In the first versions of the photo I used a higher position to shoot which would have helped to get rid of the people walking around within the photo, but then I saw the „more london riverside“ letters on the left and decided to include those to tell the story of a London photo trip without further explanation. When trying this I found out that the silver rail above the letters would be a perfect basis for the composition and give the photo a more structured and clean look. I really like what it is now. What do you think?
We’ll continue our walk to Covent Garden Market (well, I know that this is the opposite direction again, let’s just assume we never realised this).
Covent Garden offers many little and beautiful shops, put into quite traditional buildings and some being there for many decades. The shop shown above is not one of those shops, it is one of billions of Chancel boutiques that look the same every time you enter one of them. However, the way they used the Covent Garden colours to integrate the shop really caught my eye. I was lucky that a street musician just started to play right left hand which made all people come closer to listen to him. The right side of the hallway was empty then, I took my camera and tried to frame the indoor/outdoor mixture with dark colours, dominated by brown and green. Again, not a demanding shot. I chose a little higher ISO to achieve more brightness. Yes, usually for such photos you’d close the aperture at least for the half of it, using f/8 or f/11 or something like that. Well, I just thought it wouldn’t matter in this case and – look at that – it didn’t. Some rules are just rules, not always reality. Just try often enough, remember what you did and tried, and, again, it will work out.
Another, let’s say ten minute walk we arrive in SOHO, right next to Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. (Yes, we’ve been close when we started our walk, let’s just make some assumptions again, ok?)
See those houses? They are the England-living-cliché par excellence. During my first shots of this location and during editing, I cut away the right part with those distracting posters and the construction equipment. But after reconsideration I realised that this was part of the scene and that the houses themselves are not really suitable photography assets, they are just boring houses. This cannot be compared to the first shots we had a look at in this article. I slightly colour graded the scenery to a more „dirty“ look and waited for the street to be empty. Voilà! Here we are. By the way, if you follow the street to the left you’ll arrive at my favourite burger restaurant. This has nothing to do with photography, but I hope some of my readers are burger fans and appreciate the hint. Last thing about the composition: I went from „special“ to „ordinary“ which means that I used aperture of f 2.8 to capture the posters really sharp and used the houses as a background. In combination with the shrinking street from right to left and the constant flow of the similar looking house walls it achieved a very natural look into the street, just like if you stood there yourself. Did I reach this goal?
Let’s finally go shopping!
Okay, here we are in the oldest shopping centre of London. This was shot inside „Liberty“ building between Regent Street and Carnaby Street. I love the light and the strange look & feel inside the building because they combine the wooden floors and walls with very modern apparel stores. I went to the highest floor and just tried different things. As you may have spotted, the photo is not fully symmetric, but I tried my best. Later I still was happy with the shot because it combines an every-day-scene with architecture fascination. The settings, again, should be self-explaining, no special thoughts on this. We’ll dive deeper into the settings with our next night shot articles.
So, for the final words on architecture fascination: you can bring an unique city architecture to life with your photos, you can combine them with typical scenes of city life, compose them in new ways and discover your personal photography style. Would you like to see more of London’s architecture? Plenty of shots just wait for their Koloury-release. Let me know what you think and if you would like to share some stories here.
Find your style!
-Koloury-