When I first started architectural photography, I only made photographs that strictly adhered to rectilinear perspectives--single point and two point perspectives where the verticals are perfectly vertical in all photographs, and the horizontals are perfectly horizontal in single point perspectives. Here’s an example from the La Brea Tar Pits Museum in Los Angeles.

Single point perspective photograph of the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, Los Angeles, CA

I never tilted the camera to look up at a building or down into a large interior space below, for example. I considered this rule #1 in architectural photography: the verticals must be vertical!

I was missing something with that strict approach to perspective control. If there are any rules in photography, then yes, this would be rule #1 in architectural photography, which is a very technical genre that demands attention to detail. Architects design buildings with straight lines (mostly), and contractors build faithfully to those specifications. Proper, rectilinear architectural photographs are therefore always important to make, and they represent the majority of the work I deliver to clients.

But there really are no rules in photography, and sometimes a few unconventional perspectives can help round out a set of architectural images. In the photograph below, I’ve thrown the rules of proper architectural photography out the window. I’ve highlighted one of the details of the building, and I’ve pointed the camera at an odd angle. The verticals are decidedly not vertical in this image.

In photographs like the one above and the one below, I’ve created an abstraction. I’m no longer treating the building as a full piece of architecture but rather as a subject where I can explore artistic possibilities. I’m finding abstract details, shapes, and patterns hidden in the architecture and turning them into full blown pieces of art--art that may get lost and ignored in the straight-ahead, rectilinear, proper architectural photographs of the building.

In fact I’ve only scratched the surface here. Artists such as Hélène Binet and Judith Turner have been making artistic images of the abstract details of architecture and design for years. As primarily a commercial photographer, however, my main motivation is to emphasize and explore the details of the design rather than to focus entirely on the artistry of the image for its own sake. In other words, for me it’s more about the architecture than the photograph of the architecture. That’s not to say that these other artists are focused solely on the art of the photograph, but I do think it can be easy for photographers like me to get carried away and to lose sight of the end client and the ultimate purpose of the photographs. So I always use these kinds of photographs only as a supplement to the primary work I do.

Crystals Mall at Citycenter, Las Vegas, NV

These photographs are not only a lot of fun to make, but they are useful to my clients as well. My clients certainly need and expect formal, proper architectural photographs, but these more unconventional images can make their work come alive in different ways for them. And sometimes a nice abstract image can make the perfect web banner or letterhead in a marketing brochure, so it’s very beneficial to my clients to get these kinds of images in addition to standard architectural photographs.

I started to rethink my strict approach several years ago when I saw a photograph by Ezra Stoller of the John Hancock Building in Chicago (here’s a link to it). His composition was similar to what you see below in my photograph of the US Steel Building (UPMC Tower) in Pittsburgh, PA. This unorthodox perspective tells a story. It exaggerates the height of the building and makes it a much more imposing-looking structure. This story is lost in more standard perspectives.

When I saw this and other non-rectilinear photographs by Stoller, I decided if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. I started to play around with different compositions and perspectives in both my commissioned work and personal projects, and it opened up a whole new world of possibilities and enjoyment for me.

As a working architectural photographer, my primary job is to produce the proper, rectilinear photographs that architects and designers expect. I bring artistry to those photographs, and I love making them; but I now also enjoy loosening things up and producing some additional images that are less structured. These photographs might break some of the “rules” of architectural photography, but in so doing they tell a whole new story of the building.

Perspective matters, especially in photography.

Two Summerlin office building in Las Vegas, NV

When I photographed Two Summerlin, an office building in Downtown Summerlin in the suburbs of Las Vegas, NV, one of the primary views was to capture the west-facing facade of the building.

A parking garage across the street provided some options for this composition, but my scouting indicated that photographing from the roof was too high a perspective. A street level photograph from that general direction also wouldn’t work because of the road and the center median of palm trees which prevented a clear view of the building. I often prefer a lower perspective for exteriors, but the obstructions ruled out that perspective.

My scouting clearly indicated that the best location was from the second or third story of the garage. Unfortunately, awnings block the view from the garage on those floors, so that perspective would be impossible.

Impossible, that is, unless you hire a scissor lift! And that’s exactly what we did. We set up the lift on the sidewalk in front of the garage and I had it raise me to just the right height. I had the operator fine-tune the position of the lift so that the trees were where I wanted them. I wanted certain parts of the building to be completely visible while I was OK with the trees covering other parts of the building. A little higher and the perspective became too flat. A little lower and the trees were too high and too much of a distraction in front of the building. A little to the left, and the trees started to cut off the left corner of the building, which I wanted to be unobscured. And a little to the right and the balcony area became covered with the trees. We made some fine adjustments until I was satisfied with the perspective.

Maybe you’re thinking, why not just use a drone? Well, I don’t do drone photography. Not yet, at least--it is on my radar for the near future. In this case, though, we wanted a twilight photograph, and the lighting and other requirements would have made using a drone very difficult for this view. So we opted for the scissor lift.

The timing of the shoot made scheduling the lift very difficult, and it ended up taking several weeks to get it scheduled. As time passed I became worried that I would not be able to complete the photograph before it was needed. So as a backup plan, I made a photograph from the roof of the garage, the location which my scouting indicated was too high. But I wanted to have something in case we could not schedule the scissor lift in time. Although I was pleased with the way the photograph turned out from a technical standpoint, and although I had invested a significant amount of time in the production and post-production of the image, it was clear that this was simply not the best perspective. It was too high. Here are the two photographs side by side for comparison.

This perspective from the roof of the garage across the street is too high.

This is the final image from a lower height taken from the scissor lift.

The higher perspective has several problems. First, we are able to see the equipment enclosure on the roof, which is not meant to be seen by a normal observer from the ground. Next, the eyebrow shade extension above the top floor--one of the architectural elements the architect wanted to capture--is completely lost because we are photographing from the same height as that element. Finally, the building just looks flattened and not very impressive. All of these problems are corrected by choosing the lower perspective.

Choosing the proper perspective is one of the most important keys to good architectural photography because as can be seen here, perspective dramatically affects the look of the final image. Getting the right perspective on location is even more important when you consider that perspective cannot be changed in post-production. I can do almost anything in post, but changing perspective is not possible. Yes, there are tools in Photoshop to alter perspective, but they really just push pixels around and use various types of distortion to simulate a different perspective. The eyebrow on Two Summerlin is the perfect example of why perspective manipulation in post-production cannot truly change the perspective. In the image from the roof, the pixels that would record the eyebrow do not exist. No amount of skewing or perspective warping is going to bring them back.

And that’s why I take my time when selecting my compositions and preparing to photograph an interior or an exterior. I evaluate the options, and I fine-tune the composition and the perspective. Once these are set, they cannot be changed in post-production, and in the end they will make or break the image.

If you’d like to read more about perspective, here’s a great article on Understanding Perspective in Photography.

Artistic Perspectives

A Matter of Perspective

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