If you are new to this blog, it probably would be to your benefit to start at the bottom post and work your way up. This blog is sponsored by weshoot.com, where you may see many examples of architectural photos, and bilbord.com, where you can see extensive retouching and enhancement of building images. Its purpose is to give anyone who wishes to photograph building interiors and exteriors the knowledge of how to do so correctly, and what to do in post-production work to make their images better and more professional-looking. I will periodically be adding to this blog. Please note that I do not allow blogspamming in comments, and any attempt to do so will wind up with the comment being removed.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Basics
Let's start with film:
Let's face it, film is on its way out as our photographic medium. While we still personally have our film equipment, digital is our new means of capturing images. Still, there will be
purists and diehards among photographers who feel film is the best medium. Let's look at the realities. For many years we lived and worked in Los Angeles, and the
surrounding area. We had many sources for film and processing. We used to shoot mostly transparencies (Fuji Provia and Velvia), but then we discovered Fuji negative film, NPS and NPL. These films had an extra color layer which eliminated the need to shoot with color-correcting filters in mixed lighting situations, especially indoors. A negative has about two more f-stops latitude than transparency film does, giving your images more detail in shadow and highlight areas on the film. Negatives seem to be more flexible toward overexposure, so we would shoot 160 ASA film at 100. This would open up the shadow areas and provide more detail in the shadows. Negatives do not like underexposure, however, and appear blue and cloudy in
underexposed areas.
One day we discovered that most of the exclusively E6 labs (processing for transparencies) had all but disappeared. Then, a lot of the other professional film labs had also died
or switched to digital output. That means that to make a print from film, the film has to be first scanned and the digitized version is then made into a photographic print.
Since most of our customers want digital images on CD or DVD, it is kind of backward to shoot with film and change it to digital images, unless there is some reason to warrant the extra time and expense in capturing the images on film first. We are doing more and more digital capture these days. It is true that there are still some things that digital lacks. Long exposures don't always work well with digital, as it introduces digital noise in the image. Digital noise is when a shadow area of the image gets pixels of green, red, and blue, or variations of those colors mixed in with the low detail. Another problem is moire patterns, but that is a point for another posting.
Acceptable camera formats: Film.
35mm is the smallest camera format that should be considered for real architectural photography. There are super-wide-angle lenses available for this format. There are also perspective-control (PC) lenses available. I will comment on Nikon, since that is my weapon of choice in this size. The PC lens we have is the wider 28mm version. It is really a shift lens, and will allow the user to get his building uprights straight. I find that 28mm is not wide enough to completely get a large building in a tip-to-tip, three cornered photograph. I prefer lenses in the 14mm to 19mm range. The 28mm Nikon PC lens can definitely take in smaller structures, without having to put too much of the foreground in a photograph. Clients don't like to see too much of the parking lot or a field in front of their building. Super wide-angle lenses help to eliminate that.
35mm is too small a format to get large prints from the film. You will start to see grain in anything larger than a 16 X 20 print, even with fine-grain film. Scanning the film at more than 90 megabytes is a waste as you will start to see the grain at 100% magnification.
2¼" format is better grainwise for large prints, but the cameras and lenses are outrageously expensive, and there isn't the selection of super wide-angle lenses available that there is in 35mm or 4X5.
We still have our trusty 4X5 camera and 4 lenses: a 210mm lens for detail or distance shooting, a 90mm wide-angle, a very wide 65mm, and the awesome, ultra-wide 47mm lens. The 47mm is the widest lens available in 4X5 that is meant to cover a 4X5 piece of film. Careful work must be done with it, as distortion, and vignetting can become a problem. We have shot 750,000 square-foot warehouses, complete, from tip-to-tip, from inside the parking lot with this lens.
Acceptable Camera Formats: Digital.
For super wide-angle work, you will need a full-frame digital 35mm sized camera. The current crop of "prosumer" digital SLR digital cameras, the fixed lens wide angle cameras, the 2¼" medium format cameras with digital backs, and the 4X5 with a digital back won't cut it! The prosumer camera (the D70 Nikon, the Canon EOS 20D, etc.) won't cut it for extreme wide angle shots. Each of these cameras has a magnification factor (or ratio) with 35mm lenses of around 1.5:1. That means that the Nikon D70 with the 14mm lens really sees the field in front of it as an equivalent 21mm lens. Now, you may think, "big deal, what's so great about 7mm shorter focal length?" Quite a difference. If you are backed up against the fence in the parking lot, and you can't quite get the building in, you would be able to with the extra angle of view with the same lens on the Kodak DCS camera (or with the Canon full-frame unit). We use the Kodak DCS 14n camera, and it gets us those shots others can't take. It is also 14-megapixels powerful. To date, I have made a super-crisp 32"X40" print from it. You won't be able to accomplish that with the Nikon D70, incredible camera that it is. I know, I have one of those, too.
Let's face it, film is on its way out as our photographic medium. While we still personally have our film equipment, digital is our new means of capturing images. Still, there will be
purists and diehards among photographers who feel film is the best medium. Let's look at the realities. For many years we lived and worked in Los Angeles, and the
surrounding area. We had many sources for film and processing. We used to shoot mostly transparencies (Fuji Provia and Velvia), but then we discovered Fuji negative film, NPS and NPL. These films had an extra color layer which eliminated the need to shoot with color-correcting filters in mixed lighting situations, especially indoors. A negative has about two more f-stops latitude than transparency film does, giving your images more detail in shadow and highlight areas on the film. Negatives seem to be more flexible toward overexposure, so we would shoot 160 ASA film at 100. This would open up the shadow areas and provide more detail in the shadows. Negatives do not like underexposure, however, and appear blue and cloudy in
underexposed areas.
One day we discovered that most of the exclusively E6 labs (processing for transparencies) had all but disappeared. Then, a lot of the other professional film labs had also died
or switched to digital output. That means that to make a print from film, the film has to be first scanned and the digitized version is then made into a photographic print.
Since most of our customers want digital images on CD or DVD, it is kind of backward to shoot with film and change it to digital images, unless there is some reason to warrant the extra time and expense in capturing the images on film first. We are doing more and more digital capture these days. It is true that there are still some things that digital lacks. Long exposures don't always work well with digital, as it introduces digital noise in the image. Digital noise is when a shadow area of the image gets pixels of green, red, and blue, or variations of those colors mixed in with the low detail. Another problem is moire patterns, but that is a point for another posting.
Acceptable camera formats: Film.
35mm is the smallest camera format that should be considered for real architectural photography. There are super-wide-angle lenses available for this format. There are also perspective-control (PC) lenses available. I will comment on Nikon, since that is my weapon of choice in this size. The PC lens we have is the wider 28mm version. It is really a shift lens, and will allow the user to get his building uprights straight. I find that 28mm is not wide enough to completely get a large building in a tip-to-tip, three cornered photograph. I prefer lenses in the 14mm to 19mm range. The 28mm Nikon PC lens can definitely take in smaller structures, without having to put too much of the foreground in a photograph. Clients don't like to see too much of the parking lot or a field in front of their building. Super wide-angle lenses help to eliminate that.
35mm is too small a format to get large prints from the film. You will start to see grain in anything larger than a 16 X 20 print, even with fine-grain film. Scanning the film at more than 90 megabytes is a waste as you will start to see the grain at 100% magnification.
2¼" format is better grainwise for large prints, but the cameras and lenses are outrageously expensive, and there isn't the selection of super wide-angle lenses available that there is in 35mm or 4X5.
We still have our trusty 4X5 camera and 4 lenses: a 210mm lens for detail or distance shooting, a 90mm wide-angle, a very wide 65mm, and the awesome, ultra-wide 47mm lens. The 47mm is the widest lens available in 4X5 that is meant to cover a 4X5 piece of film. Careful work must be done with it, as distortion, and vignetting can become a problem. We have shot 750,000 square-foot warehouses, complete, from tip-to-tip, from inside the parking lot with this lens.
Acceptable Camera Formats: Digital.
For super wide-angle work, you will need a full-frame digital 35mm sized camera. The current crop of "prosumer" digital SLR digital cameras, the fixed lens wide angle cameras, the 2¼" medium format cameras with digital backs, and the 4X5 with a digital back won't cut it! The prosumer camera (the D70 Nikon, the Canon EOS 20D, etc.) won't cut it for extreme wide angle shots. Each of these cameras has a magnification factor (or ratio) with 35mm lenses of around 1.5:1. That means that the Nikon D70 with the 14mm lens really sees the field in front of it as an equivalent 21mm lens. Now, you may think, "big deal, what's so great about 7mm shorter focal length?" Quite a difference. If you are backed up against the fence in the parking lot, and you can't quite get the building in, you would be able to with the extra angle of view with the same lens on the Kodak DCS camera (or with the Canon full-frame unit). We use the Kodak DCS 14n camera, and it gets us those shots others can't take. It is also 14-megapixels powerful. To date, I have made a super-crisp 32"X40" print from it. You won't be able to accomplish that with the Nikon D70, incredible camera that it is. I know, I have one of those, too.
