Architectural Photography
Assignment:
Good photography often shows us the familiar in an unfamiliar way. This week you'll be taking the spaces people live and work in and trying to fit them into a frame.
Architecture is typically more geometric than natural scenes, Think about the geometry of your scene. Consider repeating elements, size relationships as they change under perspective, the lines induced by vanishing points, and the texture and weathering of man-made objects. One way to surprise people with architecture and interior photography is by using clever composition to highlight these geometric aspects of structures that are usually overlooked. The requirements this week will get you to play a little bit with geometry, and also to think about the practical concerns of people who need to represent an interior space in a photograph.
Requirements:
There are five requirements, which you will meet by taking 2 photographs for each requirement, so a total of 10 photographs. Write a short description below each of your photos explaining what camera settings you used, why you used the camera settings you did, how you composed your shot and why, any interesting story behind the photograph, any image processing done afterwards, and what requirement the photograph meets. Be mindful of your camera settings while taking photographs. Here are some of the sorts of things to consider for descriptions:
-
What did you focus on? Why?
-
What size did you set the aperture to? Why?
-
What exposure time did you use? Why?
-
What settings did you let the camera figure out automatically? Why?
-
What focal length (zoom) did you use? Why?
-
Why did you take the photo from where you did and include in the frame what you did?
-
Did you color correct the image afterwards? Crop it? Sharpen it?
Here are the five requirements - Two Photos for each - Total 15 Photos for each photo
Requirement 1: Create two Vertical or Horizontal vanishing point photos. Vertical lines in the world (eg corners of buildings) must visibly converge to a vanishing point either within, or nearly within your frame. To do this, look up or across the front of a building, and use a wide field of view (a short focal length).
Requirement 2: Create two photos with NO vertical or Horizontal vanishing point. Vertical or Horizontal lines in the world must appear parallel in your photograph. You can do this by looking straight ahead when you take the picture and fixing the composition by cropping later. You can use Photoshop's perspective warp tool (found in the Edit->Transform menu) to make these lines parallel. You can also use the lens correction tool found in the Filter->Distort menu.
Requirement 3: Frame your shot. Take two photos shot through a door, window, archway, or other physical man-made frame. The frame should be visible in the photograph, but is not necessarily the subject. The frame need not be rectangular.
Requirement 4: Humans meets nature. Take two photographs where the subject is neither a human-made construction, nor anything natural, but rather the interface between two such things. For example, where the side of a building meets the ground, or a tree growing through a fence. Be creative!
Requirement 5: Interior Panorama. Create 2 photos. As real-estate agents know, it's hard to capture the interior of a room without making it look small, and it's usually impossible to fit the entire room in the frame (where would you stand?). We're going to solve this with an interior panorama. Stand in the corner of a small room, or at the center of a large room, and take a sequence of photographs that captures the entire room, rotating the camera about its center of perspective (somewhere in the middle of the lens). Make sure your photographs overlap by about 50%. Then, convert your set of photographs into a single panorama, showing the interior of the room. We want to see the panorama, not the source photographs. Try to find an interesting room to do this in. Interiors are often dim, so pay attention to your camera settings and the available light.