Architectural Photography Almanac
A resource for working professional photographers and design industry professionals featuring news, commentary, equipment resources, and original articles
As I continue to mature as a photographer, I am finding that I learn most from fellow peers who share a more in-depth analysis about a single image – taking us through their thought process in how they constructed the image and why they chose a certain composition or a particular way to light the scene.
Remember that time on Sex and the City when Carrie went to boot up her laptop and got Sad Mac? If you’ve never blown on a Nintendo cartridge or used a pencil to wind a tape cassette, you’re probably too young to remember Sad Mac (actually, you might also be too young to remember Sex and the City, in which case, thanks for making me feel ancient).
Let’s be honest. Many of us spend more computer time than we would like to admit. Having an efficient workflow in the office allows us to free up more time for sessions — plus your eyes and back will thank you for it! In this post, I share three apps that are essential in my in-office workflow.
For those of us living in California and the rest of the West Coast of the US, it’s been a crazy few months to say the least. Wildfire smoke has engulfed nearly every part of the region at some point over the past two months, turning skies grey and orange from Los Angeles to Seattle.
Many architectural photographers have continued to work through the fires and the resulting smoke – myself included – to great frustration and annoyance.
Sky replacements have long been standard practice in architectural photography. However, the existing tools to do so remain, in my opinion, somewhat haphazard. Some skies are an easy slam-dunk, capable of being replaced in a few clicks using something as simple as the Tragic Wand or Quick Selection tool.
Adobe has just updated its “photography plan” applications, Lightroom and Camera Raw with some great new features. Aside from the usual performance improvements, Adobe has (finally!) changed the user interface found on Adobe Camera Raw, integrating it seamlessly with Lightroom. Additionally, they have rolled out a couple of brand new features: ISO Adaptive Presets and Localized Hue Editing.
One of the cardinal rules for architectural photography is that vertical lines must remain vertical. It’s considered bad form in many instances to photograph a building and have it look like it’s falling backwards, or heavily distorted. Unfortunately, there may be times when it just isn’t possible to achieve this in camera and some post production is required.
Architectural photography started for me as a hobby, but from the very beginning of the ‘photographing my hometowns cityscape‘ stage, I called my photography Facebook page György Palkó Architectural Photographer. That name led me to my first contract. Five years and many many jobs and clients later we moved into our new home last year.
For the first few years of my career as an architectural photographer, I swore by Adobe Lightroom. In my experience, Lightroom has been incredibly useful for going through a large batch of images, but it doesn’t quite keep up with Capture One’s refined controls, so I started looking at Capture One as an alternative.
Adobe has recently updated Lightroom and some of the new features are pretty useful.
As architectural photographers, I’m sure most of us are pretty familiar with having huge numbers of layers in Photoshop. Light painting and compositing can cost a lot of storage and many of us have become accustomed to using PSB files, especially with the advent of higher-megapixel cameras where only a few layers will put you over the size limit.
A new year gives us all an opportunity to rethink our processes and see if we are doing the tedious back end parts of our jobs in the most efficient way. In 2018, I started a new — and more organized — system of organizing my files, and so far it has been working out really well for me. Data storage and file handling is usually incredibly personal and changes from person to person, so just remember, there is not one single right way to do it.
In my previous article, I admitted to both using Lightroom’s HDR function and showing that it’s a viable solution for professional architectural photography. There are many benefits to post processing with this technique, because what you end up with is still a RAW file, you can play with white balance, shadows and highlights exactly like on a single capture, but with the extended dynamic range offered by a blended HDR file.
Justin Szeremeta
Brandon Vogts
Dane Alonso
Mike Kelley
Usman Dawood
György Palkó