Name: Architecture Photography Tips
Uploaded: 2020-05-24T07:10:11.000Z
Duration: 11 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

No question, buying a camera and learning how to use it has been one of the best investments

Photography is one of the meta skills I think every creative person has to cultivate, you

know, it teaches you about light, and composition, contrast, color; all these things that are

linked to our experience of, not only architecture, but the world.

I think it's helped me see the world more objectively, you know viewing it through the

lens of a camera, it's just a really valuable skill set to have in your toolkit.

So, I'm not a professional architectural photographer but I've learned a few things having shot

a lot of architecture over my professional career.

So I wanted to share with you some of the mistakes that I made when I was first starting

One of the underlying style elements of architectural photography is maintaining parallel lines

in your image and especially parallel vertical lines.

So to achieve this you have to keep the focal plane which is basically your camera sensor

in here perpendicular to the ground plane.

Now, once you tilt the camera you start to introduce a forced perspective in your image

which creates converging lines rather than parallel lines and it also tends to make the

building look as though it's falling backward, which can admittedly be a good thing if it's

exaggerated or that's the effect that you're going for, but if it's just subtly off it's

So the pros use tilt shift lenses for perspective control which allows them to physically move

Now this corrects the distortion right in the camera it bakes it into the image.

But those types of lenses come at a really steep price.

You can also correct for this in programs like Lightroom Photoshop or even Snapseed

Once you get used to correcting for it you'll probably start to notice it everywhere.

Now correcting this in Lightroom is really simple and I'll show you how.

Okay here we are in Lightroom I have this photo of this church in Quebec City and I'm

just going to show you how to correct the verticals.

We're in the develop module I'm not going to go through any of - all of - these settings

at this point I'm just going to keep those as they are.

And I'll go to the transform panel here and you'll see I'm off level and also my verticals

So there's a couple of ways to do this: the first way is just to choose auto and that's

gonna make its best guess and you can see here it's corrected our verticals.

If we come over here to the grid our verticals look pretty good there still converging just

a little bit and then our horizontals, it's pretty close again.

The other way you can do this is you can choose purely vertical.

So here it looks like it corrected our verticals a little better, you can also choose level

which doesn't look like it did a very good job.

The vertical looks good but the horizontals here look a little tweaked.

Now the other possible way that you can do is guided and so we'll choose a couple of

verticals here - you pick your vertical lines in the image - and you can be as precise as

you want to be here I'm just getting it roughly close.

And then we'll choose our horizontals like this, you can see it gives you a zoom box

And if you had more horizontal lines - I don't have a lot of horizontal lines here that I

can work with - but if you had more you could adjust this with more granularity.

One last thing I want to mention and this is sort of a compromise solution because when

you're doing this it's modifying the pixels so it is destructive in some sense.

That is the compromise when you use a tool like Lightroom or even Snapseed's tool it

will distort the image and the pixels in it.

So you'll want to plan for this because you're gonna have to crop the image in crop it in

You're losing a bunch of information on the sides which is fine actually because I think

it actually just focuses on the subject of the photo even more.

White balance has a big influence on the feel of your image whether that's warm or cool

and it can be tricky to get right if you're mixing light between inside and outside.

Now this is another thing that once you start correcting for it in your images you'll start

to notice when people don't white balance their images.

So you've probably seen the classic white balance mistake where an interior has a really

So daylight, incandescent light, and LED lighting they all have different color temperatures

and they each introduce a different color cast into your image.

So changing the white balance allows you to correct for this and it allows you to choose

which one represents the scene most accurately.

So I sort of view it as an artistic decision in my workflow as I'm editing the image in

Shooting your images in a RAW format will give you the most flexibility to change things

in post but you can modify white balance even if you're not shooting RAW.

If you're shooting on your phone just hop into an app like Snapseed and give it check

what the auto white balance feature does for your image you might be surprised how much

Using a tripod rather than hand-holding your shots allows you to push your camera's manual

settings exactly where you need them, say that's a long exposure for a low-light environment,

or to focus stack, or to blend multiple exposures of a scene to capture a higher dynamic range.

Let's say you're shooting an interior room which has a window with lots of exterior light

If you were to expose for the interior the window area would be just way overexposed

And if you were to expose for the exterior - for the window - the interior would just

So professionals will usually expose for the window and bring the light level up inside

to compensate with supplemental lighting like strobes.

But if you're lacking that kind of professional gear - and you probably are since you're watching

this - you can simply lock off your camera on a tripod and take a series of multiple

You're going to bracket the same scene and then combine those bracketed images in Lightroom

or Photoshop to capture a broader dynamic range for that scene and a more accurate rendition

of how the eye actually experiences the architecture; that's what you're after.

Now I mentioned tilt-shift lenses as the standard go-to for serious architectural photographers

but most of us don't have the budget for those they're in the multiple thousands of dollars.

Most commonly you're going to want to use wider angle lenses for architecture but if

you go too wide you'll get lots of distortion it's just not gonna look right.

For interiors and tight spaces I'm usually using the 16 to 35 which is a zoom lens and

that's on a full-frame Canon 6d mark 2 now if you're using a crop sensor like a 70 or

an 80D you can pick up this 10 to 18 zoom for not a lot of money and for those cameras

the crop sensors it covers roughly the same focal range like 16 to 28 millimeters so still