Architectural Photography Almanac
A resource for working professional photographers and design industry professionals featuring news, commentary, equipment resources, and original articles
HDR has become a dirty word in professional architectural photography. We’ve all seen the over-processed HDR real estate photos where the colors and tones are off, and everything looks crispy and awful. Don’t get me wrong; tasteful HDR like the work of Trey Ratcliff as an artistic choice, now that can be cool.
There are many situations where the 24mm TS (Nikon or Canon) — our standard lens for architectural photography — isn’t quite long enough. Maybe you want to make a detailed vignette. Maybe you’d like to hide the side of a building which doesn’t look so great. You may need to do the opposite and highlight something important that requires a different focal length than 24mm.
We have arrived at my third and final image in this series, and this time, we’re photographing an interior. In the first two articles, I showed how I create twilight and daylight exterior images. To create this image, I used just a handful of techniques, such as blending different exposures, cloning, cropping and making some color adjustments.
In part two of my behind-the-scenes series in the Hungarian countryside, I’m going to jump into (ha ha…) a more complicated daylight image that I created. This image, like anything in architectural photography, contains quite a bit more than meets the eye, and utilized many different techniques to put together a visually harmonious image.
My name is György Palko, and I’m an architectural photographer based in Hungary. For my first post on APA, I’m going to share how I edited one of my favorite twilight images. To perfect this image, I used a wide range of techniques including exposure blending, color correction, cloning and sky replacement.
György Palkó