Mike Kelley

DBOX is an international creative communications agency that creates campaigns in the sectors of luxury residential, hospitality, commercial, and cultural property. Specializing in both renders and photography, DBOX is at the top of the global architecture marketing game and were kind enough to sit down for a chat with APA to discuss their inner business workings, their frustrations, and their efforts to remedy an industry-wide scourge.

The architectural photography community is spread thin across the world, yet we are a close-knit community brought together by the internet and our shared love of photographing homes, businesses, art, and design. Currently, there is little to no data available related to the way we operate and the most frequent questions that we receive on APAlmanac relate to how people across the world run their businesses and what they can do to improve their own businesses.

Beloved British Baking Show Contestant YouTuber Tom Scott is known for his short, humorous, informational videos covering everything from sending garlic bread into space to navigating the interior of the brain with neurosurgeons. In one of his most ambitious projects to date, Tom Scott tackles a topic that is close to the hearts of every artist: copyright.

I photograph a lot of homes for a lot of different clients with a lot of different end uses for those photographs. While in a perfect world I’d get a photo credit every time my work was submitted, sometimes that doesn’t happen and it’s up to me to get it fixed. Whether or not you think photo credit is important (it is, don’t @ me), you should always have any errors or omissions in credit resolved as soon as you can.

I think it’s safe to say that the current pandemic sucks for everyone involved. Short of toilet paper manufacturers, pretty much everyone on planet earth is dealing with ramifications and fallout of the ongoing…issue. A few days ago I asked a group of photographer colleagues how they were being impacted, and received a wide range of responses and opinions.

San Francisco photographer Peter Lyons has been working all over the Bay Area for years now, and since the advent of cameras using built-in GPS, he’s geo-tagged nearly every photo he’s taken. Peter recently shared a screen shot of his work history and I was blown away.

As far as I’m concerned, Peter embodies the image of a classic working photographer.

A scout is an integral part of the architectural photography process, but one mistake I see a lot of photographers making is that they agree to a scout before they are in contract to complete the shoot. It’s gone pear-shaped on me enough that I implemented a policy requiring a deposit before any scouting takes place; here’s why.