++1 I took a week long workshop from Norman in the early 1990's. Learned a lot; way more than from a book or this forum! Frankly, I stopped doing architectural photography because most architects did not want to pay what it was worth, and they typically took months to pay when they did. Had a difficult time relating to them that I was a photographer, not a bank! LOriginally Posted by Mark Sampson
Luis, believe me..it feels that way for us architects with our clients as well :-( Nonetheless, my firm pays our suppliers when invoices are due.
I'd suggest renting a camera and lenses, instead of purchasing - there's a lot to good architectural photography. There's a reason architectural photography is expensive, and odds are you're not going to be able photograph your work well without A LOT of practice. There's also the fact that a good photographer brings a new perspective and is able to distill the essence of the space without the bias of any problems during construction/design/with clients.
If you're just wanting to learn how to shoot spaces, I say go for it, but start with natural light. A lot of spaces look amazing at a certain time of day, and it's up to you to watch/figure out when that is... Bringing in supplemental lighting is difficult to do well, and it's easy to get overwhelmed quickly.
And instead of a 6d, use a sony a7/r with an adapter for canon ts lenses, or stick with film. The dynamic range of either the sony or neg film will really help you out.
PThanks all for the great advice and tips!
I studied with Norman McGrath in Maine in 1989. I learned a lot; the principles still hold, whether film or digital. Professionally now I shoot digitally and would never go back to 4x5; personally I still work in 4x5, and will as long as I can. cdavis may well be right; the architecture shooters I've worked with prefer the Canon T/S lenses.
I have a new magazine assignment that has a surprisingly large budget and plenty of time to do it ( prints next Summer ). There is an architectural component to it that I am going to also largely shoot with digital. But for the fun and experience of it, I have decided to try and produce some of it in 4x5 as well.
Great!!!
Please let us know how it goes.
This is going to sound dumb, but I will offer it anyway. Many moons ago I did a lot of wedding photography. And in a sense, especially in large spaces such as churches, one runs into the same issues as in photographing interiors. Sure, the emphasis is on people, but unless one wants a couple of people surrounded by black, one has to pay attention to how the rest of the place is lit. So of course, lights were put on the people, but it could have just as well been a piece of furniture or an architectural detail. And if necessary smaller lights (lumedynes) were placed behind altars and other furniture and pointed at significant details in church altars, homes, etc. to bring out detail in them. And of course, one has to take into account the overall fill, or ambient light. So oftentimes there would be a very long shutter speed coupled with a small f stop to give depth, capture ambient light, and control the flash exposure.
Best thing to do before you do much else is get a real good flash meter, and learn how to use it for both flash and ambient light, and learn how to balance those two. Then you can start looking at how you want to light up certain parts of the interior, which will basically be a matter of balancing. And don't forget the inverse square law. Just because you light something adequately doesn't mean that things behind will be lit adequately. Light falls off with the square of the distance (if you double the distance the light falls off the square of that doubling, or 2 squared. i.e. 1/4 the intensity) If you have a very large object or interior you may have to use multiple lights from front to back to keep a balance on the entire object.
Having shot interiors on 4x5 color neg and transparency and now on Canon 5DS with an array of tilt and shift lenses, there's no comparison. The Canon images are simply superior in every way to the 4x5. What used to take several hours for a single shot using many lights and a ton of Polaroid is now accomplished far more effectively with minimal or more often, no added lighting at all (I recently shot Studio A at Capital Studios with two Arri 650's bounced on the ceiling). What you have today is automatic perfect frame registration which makes blending multiple exposures a breeze. You also have basically infinite color balancing options when processing raw files and it's almost too easy to shoot a set of exposures for the interior and a separate for the windows, balanced for the outside as needed. The lenses today on the high res 35mm digital are actually better in almost every case than drum scanning 4x5, plus you get the added benefit of much greater depth of field from the shorter lenses, and you can shoot at f/11 vs. f/22-32 on 4x5. And for those really wide shots, it's also super easy to stitch three images together with either the 17 or 24 t/s-e lenses and make images you could never do with large format. I don't know a single architectural shooter who would ever go back to 4x5 for commercial work. Maybe for nostalgia, but even then probably not. Heck, I've shot the same rooms a dozen years ago with film and today with digital and there's just no comparison. I'll post a shot that is a three shot stitch with the 24 t/s-e, with each section probably an eight exposure bracket from dark to light and lit with the aforementioned Arri's bounced on the ceiling to make in effect a giant soft box for the Neve mixing board. I don't even know if this shot would be possible on 4x5. A medium format Alpa, yes, but that's a whole different league of expense.
I've been shooting interiors professionally for 20 years. While I'm shooting more film nowadays than I have in a long time (for my personal projects), I would never go back to film for architecture. My favorite setup right now is the Sony, A7r2 and tilt/shifts, usually all mounted on an Arca Swiss Mf2.
Seriously, I couldn't imagine trying to get consistent, professional results on film... not unless I used digital as a 'Polaroid'. I still carry as much lighting as I did with film, but typically don't use as much and shot times now take about an hour and a half, where 3 hours was the norm with film. Also, I never really understood 'painting with light' for interiors. You can achieve much more accuracy setting up multiple lights.
If I were you, I'd get a digital rig, forget the lighting and learn how to blend exposures. That's the common workflow for a lot of my competitors.
IMHO,
CB
BTW... this is the amount of lighting we usually fly with, but I think my generation of Arch Shooters are becoming the exception.
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