Urban Buildings Need Urban Angles: Melbourne City Photography
Whether you want to market your newly-constructed building, lease out offices or sell a property, high-quality photographs are essential. Photography of city buildings presents a different set of challenges which require a correct understanding of urban angles. Melbourne has a beautiful cityscape with towering skyscrapers, concrete structures, and an always-in-motion city – how do you capture the essence of all this in pictures?
• Wide angle lenses: Due to the presence of other buildings, people and vehicles, you will probably need to be very close to the building. In order to get the widest viewing angle, wide angle lenses are a necessity. Variable focal length zoom lenses are also useful for capturing the minute details.
• Stable tripod: Since buildings are inanimate objects, you do not need to worry about motion and can plan your shot to the last detail. For perfect pictures, take your time setting up the camera and give as much light exposure as needed. A stable camera is essential for clear photos at slow shutter speeds and it is here that a stable tripod is of value.
• Camera position: Using wide angle lenses very close to a building can give quite a dramatic perspective to the photos. For a solid look that does not emphasise the foreground objects, put a little more distance from the building to the camera. Even a few metres difference can produce quite a significant change in the photo.
• Converging vertical lines: When shooting tall buildings from nearby using wide angle lenses, you will notice that the walls appear to lean and converge towards the centre. This is not desirable especially in architectural photography where you are trying to present a realistic picture. Taking photos from a distance using longer lenses, using stepladders to gain height or even shooting from the window of a neighbouring building are some techniques used by photographers to avoid converging lines.
• Managing people: When taking photographs in crowded city streets, it is very difficult to avoid people. Photographers try to overcome this problem by doing photo shoots outside regular office hours or even during the weekends.
Whether you are a builder, architect or property developer trying to showcase your work or a real-estate agent trying to market the property to potential buyers, you require the services of a top-class photographer familiar with urban angles.
Melbourne businesses can visit our ‘We Shoot Buildings’ website for building photography examples of our work as well as details of the current packages that we offer.
Written by Grant Kennedy