It's been difficult building my architectural photography portfolio. Partly because usually getting a nice dramatic dusky shot usually requires good premises access for turning lights on or off, possibly adding or modifying lights, opening or closing shades, moving cars off the street etc. This is the public library in Durango, CO which I've had in mind for quite a while. The front side usually has a lot of cars and clutter when the library is open and the lights are on. But one evening it occurred to me to
photograph the back side which is the more pleasing elevation anyway because of the big windows and open feel, where patrons can enjoy the view of the Animas River instead of the parking lot. Presumably as the architect intended. Often the goal of an architectural photo is to communicate a warm inviting interior. Dusk is a great time because of the cool outside / warm inside contrast. The library was open and almost all of the lights were on when I shot this and there wasn't anything I would have changed about the lights so it was a sitting duck ready to be shot. I captured this on my last night in Durango in stormy weather which adding some extra drama making the interior even more inviting. The lack of greenery due to the season bothers me but other than that I'm pretty happy with it and will go over the steps I used to create this.
I wanted enough ambient illumination on the exterior to retain detail. This is a crop of my first shot taken at a time when the natural ambient light was sufficient enough to retain detail on the exterior brick and make the metal surfaces shiny and punchy. The interior light had a complimentary light ratio and a fairly consistent and warm color temperature without modification. Remember that most artificial light records differently on film or a digital sensor than what the eye sees in real life. Sometimes you end up with unexpected problematic color casts. Here luck was on my side and the lights record consistently yellowish amber throughout even though my white balance was set to white. In a lot of situations, this poses a problem but here, warm color cast was exactly what I was after so there was no need for white balance adjustment possibly having negative affects on the outside ambient light. Or placing color correction gels on the lights which probably wouldn't have gone over well with the librarians or patrons. However there's a problem that I wanted to remedy. Notice that the sky is reflecting onto the glass washing out some of the interior warmth. Not a huge problem but I knew I could take another shot later and composite relatively easy. In retrospect I might have tried a polarizer filter to cut the glass reflections, though that probably would have also affected the metal too which I did not want to alter.
About 20 minutes later, the sun went down further, the sky darkened, and the reflections went away even though I didn't change my exposure. This is simply because the sky darkened and didn't reflect as much on the glass (or metal). But obviously the brick and landscaping are very dark now.
My solution was to overlay the 2 exposures in Photoshop and create a layer mask for the glass. This wasn't very difficult because it didn't have to be perfect. I generally created selections with the polygon selection tool and filled those selections with white revealing the glass of the later reflection free glass exposure. One area I quickly painted with a white brush. The result is a composite with a nicely exposed exterior including shiny metal, but with glass free of reflections. The best of both worlds.
Also notice that I darkened and saturated the sky for more contrast and drama. I created a separate mask to adjust the sky only with a hue/saturation adjustment. This is a great opportunity to discuss an important principal of graphic design, complimentary colors.
Adobe has a great free resource at https://kuler.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/ for looking up complimentary colors. Here I moved the control point on the color wheel to blue. The complimentary color to blue is showing at the opposite side of the wheel, in this case yellow. We are creating art so there are no rules, but complimentary colors are a good guideline for composition no matter what you are creating. In my case the dusky blue sky compliments the yellow interior. Think about making use of complimentary colors with your next creation.
As with most architectural photography, it's important for the vertical lines to remain vertical. You don't really notice this in real life when looking up at a building because your eyes don't have a rectangular frame. It's the rectangular nature of a photo that creates an unflattering illusion of a building collapsing into itself due to the upward perspective. In other words, the vertical lines appear to converge. My viewpoint was lower than the building so shooting level wasn't possible. You can buy very expensive tilt shift lenses that allow you to tilt the focal plane in the lens without post processing. If you've never priced a tilt shift lens, believe me you don't want to know. But there are easy ways to accomplish this in post though at the cost of some pixels and field of view. Photoshop has a perspective adjustment filter but I like to place some vertical guides for reference and use a distort transform for more control.
Here you can see that I've stretched the top corner control points outward and the bottom corner control points inward until the vertical lines of the building align with my vertical guides. Obviously some cropping and or cloning is then needed to get rid of the empty black space on the bottom corners. Retain this fact carefully and shoot wider than you think in the field because you'll need to accommodate some cropping unless you can shoot perfectly level which is rarely the case.
Here is the final crop plus some yellow added to the brick and stone that appeared too blue from the dusky blue light coming from the sky in my opinion. I simply used the select by color tool, picked a sample of brick, and adjusted the tolerance to get a decent enough selection of just the brick and stone hues. Then added some subtle yellow with a color balance adjustment. Pretty pleased with the result though the tree is blowing in the wind creating motion blur in my fairly long low light exposure. I could have opened the aperture about a stop without loosing noticeable depth of field at this wide focal length, and/or I could have pushed my ISO for a faster shutter speed. If noise would have resulted, I could follow my own advice on noise reduction in my last post:)
Hopefully you found this article useful and interesting. If you have and questions or comments please let me know and let's share ideas. And please "like" my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/wayneharneyphoto or follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/WayneHarney to receive notices about future postings.
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