On Sunday, I needed to take my friend Brian down to the airport at 7am. I figured since I was already down in the area, I would take a couple hours and explore the downtown district. A nice mellow stroll developed into an obsessive hunt for parking garages that I could get on top of so I could get cleaner views of the high-rises around me. I did find one garage on Market and 6th that had an open parking area on the roof. I shot a few HDR shots of a building but felt that I could come back for excellent dusk shot. Here's the scouting shot.
I returned last night and drove up to the top level to set up. The tripod I use for archtecture is one that my friend Scott gave me. It is a tank of a tripod that is beaten, broken, needs to be tightened all the time, sticks when trying to pull the legs out, is heavy as hell and basically would work really well with 50 cal rifle mounted on it. But it was free, has geared movements and holds my camera steady, so I like it. Either way, when I was seting up, I think I was getting skeptical looks from tenants of nearby apartment buildings wondering what I was doing. My friend Randy called while I was shooting and I got to multitask some wedding business while shooting this highrise. I shot for about 15 minutes capturing the waning light of day and then packed up to go home. Right as I finished a security guard walked up and towards me. Since I was done, I smiled, waved and drove out of there to avoid confrontation.
Techy talk. The shot was fairly simple. I shot with a 24mm TS lens. Originally I planned on shooting it vertically. The building was a wee bit too tall to shoot it with a 45mm TS so I had to use a 24mm. Vertically, the 24mm made the building way to small and included too much sky and street so I went to a horizontal composition. In the end, I really like how the horizontal compostition placed the building in its environment of the downtown area. Even the stadium is showing on the far right.
The exposure was 15 seconds at f11. A small note on determining exposure for this type of shot. Figure out what are your fixed variables and base exposures on that. Then let nature fall into line with your fixed variables. In this situation, the street lights are going to be a fixed brightness and I can't do anything to change their exposure values. My only other light source is the sun and I know that as it goes down, it will obviously get darker. So if I am set up early and determine exposure for the street and window lights, its just a matter of time before the ambient light will match that of the street lights and we have a balanced exposure.
I did very little post process on this shot. At the bottom of the frame, there is an empty lot with a track hoe sitting in it. Not very aesthetic. I chose to darken that area to take the emphasis off of it rather than doing PS and adding a building or something.
So, there you go. Shooting a building in 18 minutes from setup to tear down. I love doing this stuff!
2 comments:
cool stuff man, thanks for sharing.
Nice shots Giles! If you are up that high on the parking deck it might be fun to get some stock TS images of the street and people for that "model set effect". HDR is a great too! I have been trying to create linear gradient masks on my backgrounds to knock down that funky halo effect. Also trying to get some last snow shots for that silver-print look you get after tone-mapping. Planning a photo trip from MT to CO via Yellowstone, Teton, Crater of the Moon, Escalante, Capitol Reef, Zebra, Antelope, Tunnel Canyons and hopefully Havasu Falls in May.
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