Master the art of modern photography

This month: Architecture

Challenge your camera skills by tackling buildings, structures and skylines

Twilight, when there’s still good colour in the sky, is a great time for buildings.

Will Cheung

Will Cheung

An imaging journalist and freelance photographer based in London, Cheung has a wealth of experience over several decades. www.williamcheung.co.uk

Architecture is a huge subject in photography. Whether you enjoy tall, shiny buildings or something more classical, there’s something for you. Not only is there plenty of choice with subject matter, but there’s also the chance to express yourself creatively in a distinctive style.

Better still, you don’t need specialist equipment. While it is true that professional architecture shooters will use perspective-control (PC) lenses to enable verticals to be recorded correctly, as an enthusiast creator, you don’t need such specialist and often expensive optics. However, if you do get bitten by the building bug and a PC lens appeals, there are budget options available.

For the sake of this Camera Clinic, let’s assume you want to create better building photos and have a modest budget to further your skills. As I have already mentioned, you are not going to struggle for subjects, so it would help if you funnelled down what area of architecture appeals. That will probably be influenced by what’s local to you.

Structures such as bridges and viaducts have plenty of photo potential; or you might prefer the grandeur of cathedrals; or maybe you have a yen for the more modern. Once you have some ideas, it’s time to turn your head to your technique options and to seize the opportunity to develop your creativity.

In this feature, there’s a multitude of photo ideas to try. If you have an extreme ND filter, you might be tempted by super-long exposures, especially as any people in the shot will blur out; or, at this time of year when the nights are long, going for a dark approach might appeal. Another option is to look at your lenses and shoot with just one type – perhaps a telephoto lens to pick out detail and compress the perspective in your shots.

Get the knowledge

Explore your lens armoury for shooting architecture

When it comes to lens choice, there’s no real right or wrong, so feel free to interpret the subject as you see fit.

The beauty of wide-angle lenses is that they give a feeling of space and make the most of bold foregrounds and lead-in lines. Moving in closer or angling the lens down can result in dramatic compositions and converging verticals but make sure to use a narrow f-stop to ensure plenty of depth of field.

With telephoto lenses, it pays to zero in on detail, which might be a gargoyle, an interesting shape or reflections. Isolating the subject can be more powerful than including the wider view.

Optic options

Enjoy great building photography with these three varieties of wide-angle lens

ULTRA-WIDE ZOOMS

An ultra-wide zoom like a 14-24mm zoom (in full-frame terms) can help you make the most of interiors, sweeping foregrounds and converging verticals. Ultra-wides, unlike fisheyes, record straight lines as straight lines but can still suffer from pincushion or barrel distortion that can be corrected in software. You get ample depth of field even at mid-range apertures, so these lenses are ideal for dominant foregrounds.