TECHNIQUE ASSESSMENT
Jeremy offered David some pointers for perfect architecture imagery
DAVID’S COMMENT
I met up with Jeremy in Cambridge, starting at the Magdalene Bridge. The bridge offered a fantastic viewpoint looking down the River Cam. The footpath was quite narrow and unsuitable for setting up a tripod, so Jeremy recommended we shoot handheld. I was eager to get my shot while these colourful buildings on the riverbank were drenched in glorious sunlight (the weather was predicted to be typically overcast). I also wanted to frame it up with the reflection in the water too. Following Jeremy’s advice, I used Aperture Priority mode with an aperture of f/11 for decent sharpness throughout the scene and boosted the ISO to 400 for a faster shutter speed to eliminate any camera shake.
EXPERT INSIGHT
FIX CONVERGING ANGLES IN PHOTOSHOP
LOOKING UP to shoot architecture with a wide-angle lens will give you perspective distortion where the straight lines of buildings will appear to lean back, towards the centre of the picture. Tilt-shift lenses can correct for this, but they’re very specialist and expensive. Don’t worry, though, you can fix the converging verticals in Photoshop with Free Transform Mode (Ctrl/Cmd+T), then just hold the Ctrl/Cmd key as you drag in the corners of the bounding box to straighten up the vertical lines. All you have to do then is crop off the extra blank space.