Adrian Schulz - Architectural Photography, 3rd Edition: Composition, Capture, and Digital Image Processing

Adrian Schulz

Composition, Capture, and Digital Image Processing

Third Edition

With Comments by Marcus Bredt

Adrian Schulz

www.adrianschulz.com

Editor: Gerhard Rossbach

Copyeditor: Joan Dixon

Layout and type: Adrian Schulz

Cover design: Helmut Kraus, www.exclam.de

Printer: WeSP through Four Colour Print Group

Printed in Korea

ISBN: 978-1-937538-76-7

3rd Edition 2015

Adrian Schulz

Rocky Nook Inc.

802 E. Cota Street, 3rd Floor

Santa Barbara, CA 93103

USA

Distributed by Ingram Publisher Services

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939104

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This book is dedicated to
my wife and son

The digital photographic medium is currently on an unprecedented roll, and ever-increasing numbers of people are beginning to experiment with the challenges and rewards of this most modern medium. Thanks to the digital revolution, architectural photography, with its endless variety of exciting subjects, has won many new fans among beginners and experienced photographers. Architectural photographers today are blessed with endless creative ways to capture and display their subjects.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is particularly true in the field of architectural photography. There is no better medium than a balanced, well-taken photograph for capturing and displaying the look and feel of a building. This book uses numerous pictures to illustrate the concepts described in the text, and it provides answers to many theoretical and practical questions regarding equipment, technique, and the reasons buildings sometimes look so different in a photo than they do in reality. There are also comprehensive sections on ways to improve your images and the opportunities presented by the magic of digital image processing.

You will quickly find that architectural photography is a unique and fascinating photographic genre.

The term architectural photography describes both the subject (architecture) and the means of capturing it (photography).

The word architecture comes from the Greek arkhitekton, which consists of roots meaning chief and builder. Architecture is ubiquitous in our lives, and its primary function as shelter encompasses a great many functional uses. Architecture is practically a humans second skin. Le Corbusier once said, Architecture is one of the most urgent needs of man, for the house has always been the indispensable and first tool that he has forged for himself.

Architecture takes on an extremely broad range of forms, from simple, primeval huts, to the ornate temples of antiquity, the purely functional factories of the industrial revolution, and the urban concrete and glass landmarks of today. Without architecture, mankind would have remained anchored in the stone age with few options of places to live, sleep, eat, work, trade, produce, withdraw, rest, administer, and educate. In many regions, climatic conditions would make life without architecture impossible.

The word photography comes from the Greek photos and graph, which means drawing with light, and describes a technical means of optically capturing the likeness of objects and making them palpable in places where they cannot normally be seen. Photography thus propagates images of buildings into the wider world, enabling people to view them in a wide variety of circumstanceswhether in newspapers, books, posters, the Internet, or in galleries or museums.

The history of architectural photography stretches back to the beginning of the 19th century when the very first photographic attempts were made. Prior to these experiments, the extreme significance of architecture to mankind gave rise to the first paintings of buildings in ancient times ().

Fig. 1: A mural in Pompeii, 1st century AD

Around the same time, architectural subjects began to represent an independent genre, especially in the context of Dutch Baroque painting. Public squares and buildings were reproduced in context and in great detail (). This guarantee of precise perspective in paintings and drawings encouraged continued development of the camera.

Fig. 2: Raphael, The School of Athens, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican City, 16th century fresco

Fig. 3: Cosmas Damian Asam, ceiling fresco in Ettlingen, late Baroque period

Fig. 4: Jan van der Heyden, The Church at Veere, 17th century, oil on canvas

Fig. 5: Matthus Merian, Lbeck, 17th century, etching

Fig. 6: Bernardo Belotto, View of Dresden, mid- 18th century, oil and tempera on canvas

Although the camera obscura and light-sensitive materials had already been discovered, the invention of the modern photographic process did not take shape until the beginning of the 19th century. In 1827, Nicphore Nipce used an exposure of several hours and an asphalt-coated plate to capture the view from his window. He called the resulting image a heliograph (). This earliest surviving photograph encapsulates one of the hallmarks of an architectural photo, namely, a depiction of perspective. This image is, coincidentally, also the first architectural photograph, even if the subject was chosen for practical rather than aesthetic reasons. Alongside still lifes, the static nature of architectural subjects made them popular in the early days of photography when extremely long exposure times made it impossible to capture moving subjects.