Documenting with photos

Architectural photography is serious business and I will be the first to tell you that I am not an architectural photographer … unless the only requirement is that you take pictures of architecture. Taking construction progress photos is part of the process I go through on all of my projects, and since I’ve started writing posts on Life of an Architect where I publish pictures for 5,000 people (give or take) a day to look at, I have become even more aware and self-conscious of the photos I take. It doesn’t take long before you realize that a picture you stick on the internet is going to show up in a bunch of different places pretty quick … you just hope that it’s not on www. “sucky-architectural-photos” .com

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I have a really nice camera and some pretty serious lenses that I get to use and play around with. I’ve been lucky, on a few occasions, to take a picture that looks like someone who knew what they were doing actually took it. However, none of the images in today’s post fit that description. In fact, all the pictures on today’s post were taken with my iPhone, which is rapidly becoming one of the more important tools in my Jack Spade messenger bag. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at these picture and discuss how I got them to look the way they do … maybe even why I took them.

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This is the corner of the large modern infill project I have been working on for the last 2 years. Evey couple of months I take a picture of this same corner – the idea being that if I wanted to, I could eventually put together a montage of the entire evolution of this corner. I know, sounds boring to me too, it may never see the light of day.

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This is a detail shot of the exterior corner of that stainless steel curtain screen. I am constantly amazed at how good a job my camera phone does and since I already have it on me at all times, I don’t have to carry around another piece of equipment to document what I see/ find on my field visits.

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You might notice that a lot of these pictures are square – that’s because I have shared them on Instagram – an online photo sharing social media platform. It’s a way for me to let people (who are interested) know what I am doing and share some of the things I see when I am out on job sites. Instagram let’s me take my photos, edit, crop, rotate, tilt shift, etc. and then publish them to Twitter or the Life of an Architect Facebook page. It is a fun tool to play while sharing information with people at the same time.

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Here is another look at the same corner stainless steel curtain screen from above as seen on my Instagram site. People who follow me can comment, ask questions, tweet it, share it – all sorts of things. They can even let me know that they like the picture … positive reinforcement is always nice.

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Here is a screen capture of my Instagram page showing the last 15 photos I shared in a glimpse. If you have an Instagram acount, you are able to view this desktop interface by going to www.ink361.com. From here, you can look at your photos, follow other people sharing photos, comment, etc. from your desktop.

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Camera+ is another iPhone application that I’ve just started using … and so far I really like it. For $0.99, I am able to edit my photos in a fairly significant manner – as well as share them directly from the application. One thing that is particularly useful are the preset filters that you can apply to the image. I don’t really want this to turn into a product review for this phone application so I’ll just say if you take photos on your iPhone, this is a great application to have and use.

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This is a detail shot of the steel stair in the modern house. Eventually there will be a precast concrete tread that will sit down on top of the tray. I took this photo as part of the on-site documentation process, but I’d have to say that the picture turned out fairly evocative, certainly suitable for presentation of the concept on our website.

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This is the same stairwell, (again). My intent at the time I took this photos was to simply document construction progress. With my iPhone and a few applications I am able to use the same picture on the website – allowing this picture to do more positive work. To get this image, I applied a “cyanotype” filter and blurred everything except the stair treads since that was what I want the focus on.

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This is the landing at the top of those stairs – a gallery type of space on the top floor elevator lobby. I took this picture as a test to see how good my iPhone could handle what is basically an all white space … could I get any clarity and definition? Turned out great.

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Now this photo … this is a super crappy photo I took when I went out to check on the progress of a job where there was some flashing being installed under a capstone. I showed up on site at a time of day where the sun was blasting me in the face when I was trying to document what was going on with the workers. (I wanted to record where they were working, protection materials being used, precautionary measures being taken, etc.) Pretty bad photo right? Yeah … but I turned it into this picture below-

Same photo, just zoomed in, cropped it, and discarded the color information. Still not sure it’s a great photo but at least it holds my interest beyond the factual data I was trying to capture and record. I even sent this picture of to the client when I left the site so that they knew I was there just like I promised.

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I love this picture … other than cropping it I didn’t modify it one bit. This is actually a color photograph of the glass tiles being installed.

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Sometimes I am just using my camera to record images I want to recall later. It might be texture, or color, form or massing – whatever. I’m not doing anything special other than using my phone camera to record what I am incapable to describing in words to full effect. I am also able to share this with a client later when trying to describe that yes … lavender and khaki twill green do (in fact) look good together.

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