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.

Friday, June 01, 2007

I haven't posted in a while. Today I did something I haven't done in a long time: Looked at 2ΒΌ-inch transparencies on a light table. No, they weren't mine. A client had about 15 sheets of the cut-apart transparencies, and wanted me to look at them for evaluation. He had had a photographer shoot four of his houses for him about a year and a half ago. That photographer had been in a hurry to shoot the jobs, and got less than spectacular results. They were bracketed (some with one extra exposure, some with ten), but generally underlit, causing blocked up areas on the film. The shots of the interiors and exteriors were dark and uninviting looking. The exteriors were photographed at the wrong time of the day, and the interiors were not well-lit, strange, considering that the client said the photographer brought lots of lighting. Either the photographer did not know how to use it to any advantage, or just plain was in too much of a hurry to deploy the lighting. Another thing is that the photographer decided to use selective depth-of-field, and as a consequence, almost all the images exhibited out of focus items nearest the lens. Some of them were out of focus at infinity, as well. That is OK when shooting athletes in their sport, or brides and grooms. I shoot with the idea that architectural detail is so important, that everything that can be in focus, should be in focus. When shooting a 4X5 camera, I try to shoot everything at around f32 to f45, if that is at least one f-stop larger than the highest number setting. In other words, if the tightest f-stop is f64, I like to shoot at f45. The tightest f-stop is not always the sharpest resolution. With digital SLRs (DSLRs), I like to shoot f16 on a lens that can stop down to f22. This will give me deep depth of field, while also giving me the near the best resolution. When shooting with my widest lens (10mm on my Nikon D80), I like to hyperfocus manually at infinitiy and shoot. At f16 on this lens, everything from 3 ft to infinity will be in focus. Just about everything will be in focus. Not so, with this other photographers work. I could just see my mentor rolling over in his grave. The killer is that this other photographer shoots for magazines and has work. Go figure!

Anyway, this photographer sent my client all the sheets of all the images taken, good, bad, and indifferent. The client has no background at choosing which images to use. I feel this was totally unprofessional of the other pro. The client should not have to make a choice of the best images out of a bunch of what I feel were less than high-quality exposures.

My advice to that photographer? Go digital. At least you can see the images on the monitor on the back of the camera, and even though focus is not easy to tell on a screen that small, exposure is easier to see. At least improve your images by using better technology.

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