How to Shoot, Tuesday 5th March 2019

Hi Folks,

Last night Chris Andrews and Brian Worley gave us a talk on how to shoot and process Architecture and a glass.

In the first half of the evening Chris gave us a run through on taking pictures of architecture from camera to the post process.

Chris said, architecture is available to all and one can take many pictures but the challenge is to make them interesting to you.

The landscape is always changing especially in London where Chris used to work.

Chris tries to be creative in producing angles of buildings that are not normally noticed and tries to put a calm and flavour into the scene of a busy world.

Before you visit a place do your research in advance.

Speak to user groups, google the street views. Find out what is accessible to you and get the knowledge of the property’s rules and whether one is allowed to use a tripod.

Google to check there are no special events taking place that may ruin your chance of getting good photographs.

Chris often travels light and just takes a couple of lens and a small tripod to use on top of a wall.

Tripods can be essential in low light.

Chris said, that placing a camera on a tripod  helps to slow things down a bit and make him think before taking the photograph.

Chris uses two filters  a polarised one to give a bluer sky and take away unwanted reflections.

A graduated filter is often used by him when water scenes are involve.

Shadows in water tend to be darker than the buildings above and using the graduation filter evens out the light by having the darker part of the filter on the building.

 

The weather and the lighting is constantly changing and there are apps to tells one where the sun will be at certain parts of the day.

Chris will often find that parts of the building are too bright and other parts in shadow.

To compensated for this Chris will use bracketing to shoot several pictures through a set exposure range and then blend them together to get the correct picture.

Also make sure you have the correct depth of field set to pick up all the textures you want.

Clouds and water are always moving and Chris said, the shot above would have been better with a textured cloud as there was not much detail in it.

 

 

The shot above was taken at Silverstone but the sky was a bit drab but a few minutes later the sun appeared to give Chris a much better photograph.

 

On the way back from a meeting Chris visited Chesterton Windmill it was not a particularly good evening but Chris went around it and took several angle shots of it but then after giving up and walking down the hill he noticed a shaft of sunlight just on the horizon.

 

 

So Chris climbed the hill again to get this wonderful shot

 

 

Architecture images often have lens distortion, some times to an advantage but mostly not.

In most software there is a lens correction facility to straighten up the leaning building.

Unfortunately that does reduce the image size to a smaller picture so better to take images with a wider lens.

 

This image was of Aylesbury car park taken from an unusual angle.

Chis pointed out that the polarised filter does not have the capacity to cover the full picture, so picking a smaller area would be better on this filter

 

This is a building in Oxford and difficult to get shots without people in them but Chris waited for some time to get this shot.

 

This is another building shot where Chris has bracketed three shots together to maintain the texture in the shadows without blowing out the sky

 

In this shot Chris used the graduated filter to darken the sky and buildings to level out the lighting.

 

Finally Chris told us he worked opposite the Shard building and was therefore able to pick the correct lighting and sky to make this perfect picture.

 

Coffee was had whilst Chris was showing people various software techniques.

 

It the second half Brian Worley gave us a talk on taking the best shots of a glass

 

this was the equipment Brian used to demonstrate the effects of each change to lighting and side panels used.

 

Brian explained to us that a flash taken from the camera just does not work and the flash has to come from behind the glass

1 – first shot with the flash aimed at the glass from the camera position – looks bad due to the shadow and too grey not white like the paper.

 

2 – flash moves to above the glass and lighting the background – still too grey, as the flash / camera is working in automatic flash mode.

 

3 – for this one the flash power was increased – still in automatic mode, but using 1 2/3-stop flash exposure compensation to brighten the whole result. You can also see more of the hall reflected in the base of the glass

 

4 – this is the same as the 3rd one, but adds the black cards to the side of the glass to reinforce the outline of the glass, and reduce the visibility of the hall in the base.

5 this is the shot number 4 above, but with a simple edit in photoshop to stretch the edges of the background and raise the contrast – I used a curve to do this. Pushing the middle of the curve up, and pushing more of the light tones to be almost fully white. Probably the two sheets of A3 paper the glass is on should have been better positioned to reduce the slight line between the two sheets that runs just behind the glass. Or fix it in Photoshop 🙂

 

Thank you to Brian and Chris for doing their talks

 

Next week is

Competition: Winner on the Night (3)