Photographing buildings

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Buildings are easy subjects. They don’t move. They don’t scowl or blink at the wrong moment. You can go back and retake the shot if you muffed it.

But there are some problems. Middle of the day, the lighting is from overhead which washes out textures and colors; so early mornings and late afternoons, when the sunlight comes from angle, is generally better. Then people sometimes get in the way, so you have to wait until the scene clears. And it is often difficult to get an undistorted view of the building.

The most common form of distortion is where the vertical lines converge towards the top of the building.

To compensate for this, there are tilt-shift lenses which correct this. The photographer here was using a film 8x10 camera with a tilt-shift lens to shoot the Flatiron Building (1902) in Manhattan.

Another way of compensating for distortions in building photographs is to use Photoshop’s distortion function (Filter>Distort>Lens Correction). However this works less well for multiple verticals such as in this photograph.

For a discussion on tilt-shift photography go here.

Manhattan, 090810, Canon 5DII, 17-40mm, f4, 1/640

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