Chapter 8 (179 - 197) Blog Notes:

Architecture and Urban Landscapes

• Indirect portraits: when you take pictures of the buildings and homes in your neighborhoods, towns, and cities.
• Architectural photography is a great way to examine the formal aspects of design, because people, using the elements of art and principles of design, created the buildings that make up our cities and towns.
• Can be formal and informal

Looking Back

• Reasons why architecture was a popular subject:
• early films were slow, often needing hours of exposure for one image
• buildings were stationary = photographers had ready subjects with lots of details, varied tones and values, and their camera exposures could last long

Photographing the Built Environment

Thinking Artistically

• You can use line to lead the viewer's eye through an architectural image
• Vertical and horizontal lines - help divide images into different sections, separating areas of different values or textures.
• Pattern: the repitiion of any of the elements of art, is uaully a part of every image.

Film

• Color films - emphasize values, shapes, and textures.
• Architectural photos: commercial and artistic
• black and white is usually the medium of choice for artistic photographers

Lighting

• Different types of lights used inside buildings:
• Incandescent lights (regular household bulbs) (more orange)
• quartz lights (modern spotlights) (somewhat yellow)
• Fluorescent lights (greener)
• Each light provides different version of white light
• Use deep blue 80A filter (incandescent) 
• FL-D filter (fluorescent)

Lenses

• Big view = wide-angle lenses because you can't get back far enough to get the entire scene you want with normal lenses; the wider the lens, the more distortion you get; keep lens level if you want limit perspective distortion.

Camera Support

• Tripod --> slow, fine-grained film and lots of depth of field

Filters

• Using a yellow or orange filter it will make the clouds stand out more in big view shots
• Filters can also bring out textures in stone and concrete

The Big View

• Big View: the wide-angle, overall view
• Perspective Distortion: appears as strong converging lines in a building, where the sides of the building angle in toward each other instead of looking parallel as they are in reality.
• The farther you are from the building, the less distortion you'll see.
• If you shoot straight on the building, it will look 2D and flat.
• If you shoot from the side, the photo will reveal better textures, forms, and shadows.
• Naturally creates a 3D view; reveals depth and width and height.

The Detail Shot

• Detail Shot: features the individual architectural elements of a building's interior or exterior.