How to correctly photograph architectural objects. Photography of architecture. A quick guide to creating high-quality images. Choose the best time to shoot

Sooner or later, a professional photographer, or even an amateur, is faced with the task of photographing buildings. This is a rather specific area of \u200b\u200bphotography, requiring the photographer to master the technique at a level that will allow to present even the most dull construction in all its glory. In order to emphasize all the necessary angles of architecture, whether it is a phlebology clinic in Moscow for an advertising campaign or an opera house, you need to familiarize yourself with the features of architectural photography.

Types of architectural photography

Shooting architecture is a huge field for photography. It can be divided into two types:

artistic;
documentary.

Art photography is based on the transmission and creation of mood, the necessary emotions, as well as the ability to emphasize the peculiarities of the city. Documentary shooting of architecture, in turn, is aimed at conveying forms, sizes, appearance and texture.

Rules for shooting architectural objects

The main feature of architectural photography is the immobility of objects and their permanent location. After all, the same building can be rented in different ways depending on the season and lighting.

It is believed that the best time to photograph architectural objects is a sunny day, when the rays will be evenly scattered and the shadows will fall softer. Under such conditions, it is possible to clearly convey all the necessary details of the building.
Choose morning or evening hours for shooting, when the sun will create overhead side lighting.
To show the volume of an object, it is better to use angular rather than facade photography.
The size of the building will help showcase and highlight people or cars in the frame.
Avoid shooting the building from the bottom up if you need to show the height. Try to find an angle in which you do not need to raise the camera, otherwise the quality of the object itself will suffer greatly.
If you need to highlight some element of the building, you can use the effect of black and white photography.

The key to the success of architectural photography is preparation. The photographer needs to carefully study the details of the building, the general appearance and features of the architectural design, choose the right time and lighting, and then not only a professional, but also an amateur will be able to cope with the task.

On a trip, a tourist trip, on an excursion, many go with a camera. The object of filming in this case is architectural structures, monuments and other objects characteristic of the area or city. However, such pictures are not always quite interesting and expressive.

As a rule, this is due to ignorance of the specifics of this type of shooting, inability to choose the right lens, shooting point. This article is devoted to these issues. It will help you avoid mistakes and achieve better results.

Frames with architectural structures, by no means in all cases give a satisfactory result: almost everyone had to take pictures with distortion of geometric proportions, in which tall buildings appear to be falling. It is known that such distortions arise as a result of tilting the apparatus upward, when the plane of the photosensitive matrix becomes not parallel to the plane of the object of photography, for example, the facade of a building.

There are so-called shift lenses, which make it possible to tilt and move the optical elements relative to the plane of the film and obtain, as a result, images without perspective distortion, but this is an expensive business. Avoiding too much tilt of the optical axis of the lens is possible when shooting from a long distance or from a high point, but this is extremely rare. Wide-angle lenses are used when shooting tall architectural structures in confined spaces. For so that perspective distortion is minimal, a number of rules must be followed.

"Curved" walls when shooting with a wide-angle lens. As you can see, the corners of the house in this photo are somewhat non-vertical. This was due to the fact that a wide angle lens was used and the shooting point was chosen - too close to the building.

First of all, you need to try to move away from the subject as far as possible, as a result of which the tilt of the camera upwards, if it is nevertheless inevitable, will be minimal. It is necessary to frame the frame so that the upper part of the structure falls under the upper edge of the viewfinder field. You should not be afraid that most of the frame will be occupied by the ground: the picture may be cropped and all unnecessary left outside of its borders. Although this involves a loss of effective frame area, the degradation of the final image will be less than that which inevitably occurs as a result of perspective distortion correction using the transform method.

Great value when shooting architectstours has a choice of shooting points... An architectural structure is usually filmed not "head-on", but at an angle to it. This makes it possible to convey in the image the length of the building in depth due to linear perspective and, therefore, emphasize its volume, space. You can also enhance the spatial effect by including in the frame elements located on the sides of the main structure, for example, trees, an alley going into the distance. When photographing architectural complexes and ensembles consisting of a number of structures united by a common artistic concept, use the side shooting point with caution. A wide-angle lens can render secondary buildings exaggeratedly large in comparison to the main building, resulting in a distorted view of the ensemble.

When photographing works of monumental sculpture, one must remember that such monuments are created in most cases to be installed in a certain place, and therefore cannot be perceived with the necessary reliability in isolation from the environment. This circumstance must be taken into account when choosing a shooting point. It should not be too high, as well as too low, since the monumental sculpture is created and installed with the calculation of its observation from the level of human eyes. The background on which the monument itself is projected is essential. So that the background does not distract attention from the main object, it should be, if possible, neutral, not colorful. The background can be considered trees, a smooth smooth wall. The least desirable background is various buildings, especially industrial structures. The best background in this case is undoubtedly the sky.

The sky is an important expressive element similar scenes, therefore, the nature of its reproduction in the photographs is given great attention. Against the background of a dark sky, for example, white architectural structures and monuments look more impressive. You can always make the sky darker in Photoshop, the main thing is to prevent overexposure. Clouds are highly desirable, which give the image an airiness, give the viewer a sense of space. In such pictures one should in every possible way avoid the absolutely white, overexposed - "paper" sky, as this makes the buildings look like a model, and the pictures lose their realism.

The figures of people and animals included in the frame help to increase the expressiveness of the pictures, to revive them, so you should use this opportunity at every opportunity. It is desirable to use this technique also because it makes it possible to create a more accurate idea of \u200b\u200bthe true dimensions of a particular monument for the viewer through large-scale comparisons. People in such pictures should look natural, not pose. Otherwise, the result is not a snapshot of the monument, but a photograph of people in front of it.

Numerous wires are a big nuisance for the photographer. It is possible to reduce the impression of them by choosing a high shooting point (above the passing wires), when there is a minimum number of them in the frame and they do not cross the monument itself. Sometimes you can get a good result if you shoot a monument in the evening. In the evening scene, the wires become subtle and do not spoil the picture. Sometimes (though in very rare cases) it also happens that the wires are so well arranged that they rather decorate the frame than interfere with it.

It is best to emphasize the volume, shape, and identify individual elements of the structure with directional lighting. In this case, the best light is considered to be incident at an angle of 25-30 ° to the plane of the building facade or the front of the monument. Therefore, the best time for filming is early morning or sunset hours (see "golden hours"), when the inclined rays of the low-standing sun illuminate vertical surfaces well, creating expressive oblique shadows on them. The contrast of lighting at this time is lower than in the middle of the day, which also has a beneficial effect on the pictures. When photographing fragments of architectural structures with carved or stucco decorations, telephoto lenses with a medium focal length are used in order to obtain images in a larger shot. In such cases, side lighting at a low angle is most favorable. "Sliding" light gives special relief to the pictures and well emphasizes the texture of the stone surface.

High relief. Mamaev Kurgan in Volgograd. Photographed in the early morning. Photographer: Karpin Anton ©

You can get good results when shooting architecture in winter. The low sun position encourages shooting throughout the day, and the snow-covered ground illuminates the shadows well, making it easier to work out details such as niches, indentations, and stucco in the pictures. Semi-back lighting can be considered no less advantageous, especially when photographing monuments that have been badly damaged by time. At the same time, a significant part of the structure is in deep shadow, which hides and makes individual damage almost invisible, and the beautiful light pattern created by such lighting emphasizes the artistic merits of the monument. They try to avoid completely backlighting, as well as diffuse, lighting in this type of shooting, since there is a risk of getting flat, inexpressive pictures. Such lighting is suitable only for filming decorative lattice fences, cut lace elements of wooden architecture, projected as a silhouette against the sky.

In order to convey the texture of the surface of the material of a structure in a photograph, it is necessary not only to correctly choose the nature of the lighting and the size of the lens aperture, but also to accurately determine the exposure. With underexposure or overexposure, the processing of the texture deteriorates or becomes completely impossible. It is known that exposure can be determined both by illumination and by the brightness of the subject, but the second method is preferable in this case. This is explained by the fact that the illumination of vertical surfaces, namely, they prevail in such scenes, to a large extent depends on the angle of incidence of the sun's rays, which cannot always be taken into account when determining the exposure by illumination. The total illumination of the earth's surface, for example, at noon, is significantly higher than in the morning hours, while the brightness of the white vertical wall of a building can have a maximum value precisely in the morning, at a lower position of the sun, when the rays fall almost perpendicular to its surface. Consequently, at small angles of incidence of sunlight relative to the subject, the exposure determined from the illumination may be erroneous. Similar misunderstandings can occur when shooting in semi-backlit conditions. In such situations, exposure based on brightness provides the best result, although there are a number of considerations to consider.

When photographing monumental sculptures, structures in the form of towers, steles, the most common method of determining exposure by brightness is not applicable - integral. Since the sky in such scenes occupies a much larger part of the frame than the structure itself, it will be correctly exposed in this type of measurement, while the monument itself can turn out to be a silhouette, without elaboration of details and texture. Therefore, it is recommended to use either spot metering (though not all cameras support it), or center-weighted, or even better - manual. Take several shots with different exposures, and make the appropriate choice - in which both the sky and the main subject will be exposed. At the same time, you can focus not only on the visual elaboration of details, but also on the histogram.

In large cities, architectural landmarks are often beautifully illuminated at night. This is a great excuse to practice your night photography!

Also, if you are interested in the issue of shooting architecture, I recommend reading a little about the cityscape ...

And I almost forgot - a useful video about shooting architecture!

Architectural photography, as a rule, aims to obtain a documentary photograph that creates the necessary idea of \u200b\u200bthe appearance of the object being shot or its details. In this type of photography, the main task is to truthfully and accurately show the shape of the building, decoration, sculptures and decorative elements. Architectural photography can be done for artistic reproduction of an object (architectural landscape). In this case, accuracy can be sacrificed for artistic expressiveness, maximum reproduction of the characteristic features of a city, country, era. The features of the architectural style can be emphasized by the appropriate choice of the point of view, the correct angle, the nature of the lighting. Hence, the purpose of architectural photographymay be receiving a photograph as a document or as a work of art.

Requirements for documentary architectural photographs:

1. must give a correct idea of \u200b\u200bthe structure and proportions of the architectural structure;

2. the vertical lines of the architectural structure must be parallel to each other and to the vertical edges (boundaries) of the print;

3. photography should be carried out with a lens that does not distort the geometric proportions of the object (Fig. 17.1.);

4. the tonal solution of the picture should be close to visual perception.

Features of artistic photography of architecture:

1.The bottom point of the survey allows you to create a familiar perspective for a person. The midpoint is rarely used for artistic photography. The upper angst of shooting allows you to show the space;

2. It is possible to use foreshortening to emphasize large or small sizes, raise or lower the object;

Partial closure of some objects by others;

Using the "wings" method (arches, door and window openings);

5. to highlight the sky and clouds, you can use a polarizing filter, and in black and white photography, also color filters;

6. the most effective lighting in the morning and evening hours, when the height of the sun above the horizon is approximately 25-40 °;

7. in the evening in the city, you can use the "regime time" when the sky is still blue, but the street lighting is already on;

8. Taking pictures of architectural ensembles without images of people can be as follows: use a tripod, aperture the lens, if necessary, use a ND filter and a long exposure;

9. use of panoramic shooting.

Figure: 17.1 Distorted images when photographing at an angle.

Panoramic photography - a photograph with a large viewing angle. The panorama can be planar, cylindrical, or spherical (otherwise called cubic). Planar panorama - projected onto a plane and can be reproduced on paper or on a monitor. Such a panorama is usually obtained with panoramic cameras having an angle of view of more than 120 °, which allows you to obtain extended frames with a wide angle of coverage. Such a wide angle is achieved due to the movable lens, which rotates around its nodal point, directing the light flux after the slit shutter. Panoramic cameras can use narrow (135 type), wide (120 type) film or have a digital matrix. You can also get a planar panorama by "stitching" frames from a conventional camera, although in this case it is advisable to use a special panoramic tripod head and appropriate software. Cylindrical panorama (cyclorama) - projected onto the side of the cylinder and has 360 ° coverage. You can get such a panorama by stitching frames from a conventional or panoramic camera. Spherical (cubic) panorama is obtained by the projection of the environment on the edge of the cube (the viewer has the feeling that he is looking at the surface of the sphere from the inside).

Photography of architecture, buildings, industrial facilities has its own characteristics. Firstly, it is highly dependent on the season, time of day, and weather conditions. The site visit can take place several times in order to determine the time of day at which the lighting, distribution of light and shadows on the site best conveys the beauty, shape and character of the building. When the weather is bad, the alternative is to take photographs during “normal time”. At the same time, the level of illumination of the sky and the facade of the building are leveled, and due to the difference in the color temperature of the illumination of the facade and the sky, the sky becomes deep blue, even in cloudy weather.

The second feature of architecture photography is the need to use special cameras that have the ability to correct the converging lines of buildings, that is, perspective distortions. When photographing architecture with a conventional camera, even the most perfect, the building will look unnatural, since the plane of the film is not parallel to the plane of the building. A person sees the lines of buildings as straight lines because the human eye automatically corrects the perspective. Therefore, in photography of architecture, you have to use special, gimbal cameras, which have the ability to correct perspective distortions (Fig. 17.2).

Figure: 17.2. Linhof Kardan GT 4X5 Gimbal Camera

The advantage of a gimbal camera in architectural photography in comparison with conventional photography is the presence of movement of the objective and film boards, which makes it possible, respectively, to "align" the photographed building during photography. Also in these cameras, a large aspect ratio is realized, which makes it possible to print photos with excellent detail and in almost any size. Even a 9x12 cm slide cannot be compared with digital cameras, even medium format ones.

The angle and point of shooting are of great importance in photographing architecture. Photography from the bottom, from the height of a person, is designed to show the monumentality of the building. In this case, it is important to align the building in the frame during photography. For this, either a gimbal camera or a conventional camera with a shift lens is used. Special shift or tilt shift lenses (Fig. 17.3.), are used in architecture or interior photography in order to align vertical lines on the object when the camera is tilted. An important feature of these lenses is the control of the depth of field of the subject of photography. Depth of field can be made throughout the frame, even when shooting at an angle to the subject, or you can focus on one point, blurring the environment.

Figure: 17.3. Left: Shift lens with a maximum shift of 7mm. Right: tilt-shift lens. Maximum angle 8 °, maximum movement 11 mm

Photography of architecture can also be made from a higher point, from the floor of a nearby building and even from its roof. This has its advantages. The cars parked near the building cease to "climb into the frame", trees do not cover the facade. Taking photographs from a higher point than the height of the subject makes it possible to broaden the perspective, to show the surroundings and the location of the subject of architectural photography in an urban setting or other terrain.

You can choose a shooting angle in which the camera is exposed vertically, and, therefore, there is no need for special optics.

Photography of architecture with a facade to the north is best done at regular time, or in the daytime using fusion technology. That is, take photographs from one point, setting the camera on a tripod, focusing the lens in the “manual focusing” position, changing the shutter speed. The result is frames with a normally exposed facade and a completely white sky, and a normally exposed sky, but a dark facade. By stacking these frames in Photoshop, you get a great photo.

Complexity photography of interiors associated with the correct selection of lighting, camera and lens, photography point and foreground.

For illumination, when photographing interiors, either constant light sources with a color temperature of 3400 ° K (halogen lamps) or pulsed illuminators with a temperature of 5400 ° K are used. Sources of constant light with a daytime spectrum temperature are rarely used due to their large dimensions and relative high cost (with the exception of high-budget surveys). The use of halogen illuminators is very convenient, you can clearly see where there is enough light and where you need to add it.

Since interior photography is usually carried out in the daytime, the windows take on a blue tint. If the lighting of the interior is properly balanced, then the landscape outside the window does not distract attention from the interior itself.

The use of impulse illuminators when photographing interiors allows you to highlight the sconces, chandeliers, floor lamps available in the interior due to the difference in color temperature.

If the shooting takes place in the daytime, the light outside the window will be natural. However, balancing the light is more difficult and takes much longer.

The most interesting shots when photographing interiors can be obtained by combining light sources.

When shooting an interior, the main requirement is complete sharpness of all plans, therefore, when photographing large rooms, it is necessary to correctly determine the aiming plane and choose the most rational aperture.

Perspective distortion problems are handled in the same way as in conventional architectural photography.

Vlast together with Archcode Almaty continues a series of informative lectures on architecture. The famous architectural photographer Yuri Palmin visited Almaty. At the request of Archcode Almaty and Vlast, he met with photographers and subscribers of our site and read a concise course in architectural photography.

Video recording of the lecture:

Full transcript of the lecture:

I am happy to be here, in your city, and to be engaged in a large project dedicated to the architecture of Almaty, and specifically to the period of post-war Soviet modernism.

I am Yuri Palmin, an architectural photographer, I have been doing this for almost 30 years. It’s time to somehow change my occupation, I’m doing it too much. Basically, this is the only thing I know how to do and therefore I will talk to you about it. I really hope that our meeting today can be of benefit to all of us. I think to structure tonight like this: I'll make an introduction, which I'll try to keep as short as possible. I beg your pardon if it drags on. In fact, this is a squeezed-out course in architectural photography, which I only read for three pairs, and then I also take credit for it. Of course, today I will not torment you with either one or the other, I will try to make this introduction as short as possible, because I believe that this story is the history of history, extremely important for generally understanding what I am doing and what, I believe, a person who deliberately photographs architecture today can do it. The fact is that architectural photography, like architecture, is now going through difficult times. And photography in general.

Yuri Palmin - architectural photographer, teacher of the program “Photography. Basic Course ”at the British Higher School of Art and Design. Collaborates with such popular and professional publications as AD Magazine, Vogue, World Architecture, RIBA Journal, Icon Magazine, Domus, Abitare, Speech, EXIT, Mark Magazine, Project Russia

We live in an era filled with images. Images are pouring on us from everywhere, we choke in them, sometimes we want them to be a little less. If before there were special people - photographers who delivered visual information to the consumer of this information, now there is no such division, photographers are everything. And I don't think that after a while it will be possible to talk about professional and non-professional photographers, the situation will change. But we can talk about people who are engaged in the acquisition and delivery of such visual information consciously as professionals. Maybe they should be called non-photographers. Here is a short introduction about how the history of photography is connected with the history of architecture, how the profession in general originated. Then I'll show you a couple of my projects. In the first part of my photographs will not be, they have not entered the history of architectural photography.

Architectural photography begins when photography begins. Rather, when photography ceases to be such a fairground trick, a miracle, and becomes a fairly common human activity. This takes place in the middle of the 19th century.

Architecture is a very tasty subject for photography, especially for early photography. It is clear why. Firstly, because the architecture does not move and we can shoot with long exposures, so we do not need to grip a person in a special vise, as in a portrait, so that he does not move during a four-minute exposure. Secondly, which is very important, architecture is an undeniable value. That is, when filming an architectural monument, we transmit visual information about an obviously valuable object, this is very important. In addition, at the same time, changes in the architectural profession are also beginning to occur due to the fact that engineering penetrates into architecture, they begin to connect. We know that the middle of the 19th century is the era of technically new architecture, and it is also the era of the beginning of conscious urbanism, which, of course, is primarily associated with the changes that the Mayor of Paris Baron Haussmann has been making in Paris since the early 40s. XIX century, and beyond. And it was then that the Paris Geographical Society was founded in Paris, this is the first collective of architectural photographers who study under the leadership of Eduard Baldus - in fact, the founder of the profession. These people work at the request of the city authorities, they fix the city, which is undergoing the most serious changes that have ever happened to the city in a short time in general in the history of an urbanist. These are not gradual, not natural changes, but changes, one might say, violent. Therefore, firstly, the city needs to be fixed. Secondly, you need to make a list of the city's facilities that make up its absolute value.

Looking at these photographs, we can see that a certain list of instructions has been developed for shooting architecture. First, the architecture should be removed - if possible, the facades should be removed from the front. Sunlight should fall on the facades in such a way as to reveal as much as possible the textures and architectural details of the facades, that is, as a rule, this is light that falls at approximately an angle of 45 degrees, and all geometric distortions are the most important in architectural photography, for the entire her story. This is such a small technical detail that says a lot about our profession. As you can see, in these photos, all vertical parallels are parallel.

Usually, when we walk around with a phone or a camera with a wide-angle lens, when we look up, you know that vertical parallel ones collapse, and we are really used to it. Besides, by tilting the camera, we get an image that does not match the way we see it. While when we look at architecture with our eyes, or rather not only with our eyes, but also with our brain, we constantly adjust the vertical perspective based on the data we receive from our vestibular apparatus. We know how much we tilt our heads, and we know how much we need to correct this distortion. Such a correction in technical photography is very simple. A camera from the mid-19th century has independent lens and film boards, so we can move the lens parallel to the film, as if lowering the horizon and keeping the vertical parallelism. This is what shift lenses are doing now. Then all the lenses were shift. And this is also one of the instructions: this maximum frontality and light that emphasizes details as much as possible.

The most interesting thing is that at the same time the same Eduard Baldus develops a technique that is now used in the digital process just everywhere. This is gluing. It is impossible to photograph such an interior with the then lenses, they were not wide enough. Therefore, the photograph is taken in fragments. Then these fragments - negatives are cut out, glued together, all this is natural, done by hand, all this is done on glass plates and then a composite image is printed from them.

This digital technique was invented then, in the middle of the 19th century.

I immediately jump to, as it were, such descendants of Baldus and French photographers - Marcus Brunetti, this German photographer who is famous for taking 42 photographs in 9 years and all his product of nine years of work, extremely intense, these are 42 photographs of the facades of Europe. These are the photos.

We see that they are somehow similar to what the French shot, but if we take a closer look at them, we will see that in fact it is impossible to take such a photograph. Because the angles from which the specific details of the facades are visible are actually taken from different angles. Our eye wants to see that way. In fact, looking at this facade, we, our brain, sees something like this, but we will never be able to photograph this way. Only using a very complex technique that Marcus Brunetti uses, namely, this facade, this photograph, consists of about one and a half thousand pieces taken with a very long lens from different points of the city and then corrected and glued together. This is roughly what Baldus did, only many times harder.

The shooting of each picture can actually take several years, because we know that we are coming to Paris, and there, at the Notre Dame Cathedral, one tower is sure to be restored, the same with the Cologne Cathedral. Accordingly, Brunetti returns to the same place, he, of course, has everything written down. He comes back, makes the appropriate takes and then sews the fruit of this many years of work into such pictures. It is also remarkable that such a facade was not even seen by the architects of buildings, because, as a rule, the creation of the facade of a Gothic or Renaissance cathedral took not a single generation. The architect could draw it, but he could not see it, because he was dying by the time half of the work was completed. Another of the undisputed students of this technical school of architectural photography are my very favorite respected artists, both unfortunately now deceased, Brand and Hila Becher, founders of the Dusseldorf school of photography.

All this was filmed in cloudy weather. In the same weather, with one lens, and they are famous for a series of objects that have actually entered the treasury of contemporary art. That is, they transferred the same technical photography to contemporary art and founded a school of art photography in Dusseldorf. Among their students, the very famous Thomas Strut, Thomas Ruf, Andreas Gursky, the author of the most expensive photograph in the world "Rhine II" for $ 4.5 million, the price of which is actually part of the work, but this is more difficult, this is part of a separate lecture.

These photographers also used such sets of instructions for creating a series and approached the shooting process technically, for example, this is the famous series of Strut - "Streets", they filmed deserted streets after dawn in different parts of the world. And all his streets are like this, they are deserted, they are devoid of scale, which is very important. And there is no person in them, and I will talk about the presence of a person in architectural photography a little later. This is one of the most radical architectural photographs in the world. This is a photograph of the warehouse of the Ricola confectionery factory in Switzerland.

Herzog et de Meuron is one of the most famous architectural firms. One of their latest projects is the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, you've probably seen it. This is one of the most ambitious and most expensive pieces of architecture in recent times.

The second figure, the opposite of Baldus, who, as we can see, founded a lot of things, is Eugene Atget - an extremely important figure in the history of art and culture in general.

He is also from Paris, worked only in Paris, filmed only Paris, he is one of those whom Baudelaire at the end of the 19th century called flanneres. It is clear that the concept of "flâneur" later, through Walter Benjamin and later, through the Situationists of the 60s, became one of the fundamental concepts of the new left-wing urban culture. Flaner is a person who can get lost in his own city. A flaner is a person who walks around the city without knowing where, and who is not interested in the goal, but is interested in the movement itself. A flaner is like an arrow, a measuring device that measures the city with itself, with its fine nerves, with its delicate feelings.

Haussmann's reforms led to the formation of the Paris Geographical Society, Eugene Atget lives in Paris and hates Haussmann, he simply does not tolerate ... For him, these urban reforms are cutting into the city's tacit, which he feels subtly and to which he relates very personally, intimately.

Walter Benjamin says that Atget's photographs are photographs from a crime scene, where you see, sometimes people appear at his place. But these people are not a scale, and not living characters, but an organic part of the very connection of the city with which Atget is connected by his nerves. Unfortunately, now, according to already verified information, Atget did not move around the city like the arrows of a measuring device, but drew the city into squares and planned his walks. And, unfortunately, it must be admitted, the history of art has removed this romantic flair of flanning. Then we move chronologically.

The followers of Atget are romantic photographers, photographers for whom a work of architecture is not an object that needs to be fixed, but a part of some of their inner world, which they capture when photographing the outside world. Then the XX century begins. Interesting events begin to take place, partly related to technical changes taking place in photography itself. Photography is becoming quite massive. You don't need special skills and abilities to produce high-quality prints.

Albert Renger-Patch was one of the leaders and founders of the New Objectivity movement in Germany in the 1920s. And his main contribution to architectural photography is that it is Renger-Patch who introduces everyday life into everyday life and into the discourse of architectural photography. That is, he removes both architectural monuments and city views as monuments.

In this case, this embankment is, as it were, filmed in the correct light, it, of course, was filmed in compliance with all the canons of architectural photography, but what was filmed here: whether the bell tower, or the facades of houses, or the fences that are in the foreground, we cannot say, because that everything is here. It's like an urban environment, which is not divided into separate objects for him.

He goes even further and begins to photograph industrial objects, shows the beauty of industrial objects, which for him equates to the beauty of architectural monuments. For him, for example, Gothic arches are as significant as, for example, photographs of nature.

In the late 1920s, he published a book, which he wanted to call simply "Things", but at the insistence of the publisher, the name was changed to "The World is Beautiful" and the meaning of the book, the project, was that all the things seen by the camera are very important - they become beautiful. Here's the thing. When we look at the world, in general, when we look at something, we think about what we see, we are constantly running this visual information through a huge number of filters. We have already said that we are correcting, for example, the convergence of vertical parallels absolutely unconsciously. But in addition to such simple filters, physiological, we also have cultural filters - each has its own. We know that, for example, a five-story building from the 60s is less valuable than a Gothic cathedral, let alone a nine-story building from the 70s. What do the people who took the camera in these very 20s in Germany tell us? They say that the photographic technique does not have such filters. Yes, it is soulless, but at the same time it is deprived of this constant reconciliation, perhaps, with the standards and criteria that culture brought to us. And this wonderful property of technology opens the world to us in a new way. That is, to look at the world more honestly than we see it with our eyes and brain.

And, of course, further we have the Bauhaus (educational institution - approx.V) and one of the key figures in the new photography of the 20-30s Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was one of the founders of the Bauhaus, held very important posts there, and was still a theorist of photography of a new visuality. What's going on here? A perspective appears in photography, the camera begins to tilt up and down, it starts to squint, create obliquity, just turn around its axis in such a way that our verticals become diagonals.

She begins to do things that the photographer simply could not afford before or that was a mistake. The camera moved off the tripod and took such a frame. Why is this possible? In fact, there are several explanations here. The first explanation: the new materiality revealed this very new sincerity of photographic technique.

And secondly, cameras working with narrow film appeared. And in fact, there has been a revolution that I believe is more serious in photographic technique than the appearance of numbers. Because a person began to understand that each frame is not a photographic plate, which needs to be developed separately, there you can buy, charge, carry with you a limited number of these same sheets, because this is weight, a video appeared in which 36 frames, in principle, you can shoot 10 of these rollers. Fill yourself a wardrobe trunk and shoot for your pleasure and experiment. And with this the tripod fell off. Falling off a tripod is like falling off a monkey's tail, and it has led to a tremendous change in photographic aesthetics. These are, for example, radical angles downward. You just can't put a tripod with a large camera. Curiously, the love of camera angles and the craze for this new aesthetic has suddenly begun to give way to the much stricter and newer rules that are emerging in architectural photography. Now I skip over a whole stage and turn to the man who shaped the modern architectural photography of the second half of the 20th century. This is Lucien Herve.

This is Le Corbusier's personal photographer. It is known that Le Corbusier is the only architect who has never photographed. In fact, this is not the case. A book of photographs by Le Corbusier is now out. Le Corbusier filmed from about 1907 to 1915, and he filmed everything, after which he wrote that I was one of those fools who bought a cheap Kodak camera and spent a lot of money on film, and only 5 years later I realized that photography - a fruitless occupation and absolutely unnecessary for an architect, and then I threw out this camera and took a pencil in my hands. But somehow Le Corbusier still needed to fix his architecture, and this is where this tandem developed. The best photographs of Le Corbusier were taken by Lucien Herve. What is great about these photos? Look, architecture ceases to be a monument, ceases to be an object that has top / bottom, right / left, which must be framed and completely placed in the frame.

The value of a fragment in this case is not the value that a small capital or any other architectural detail has in an old photograph when the fragments were filmed. Architecture here becomes, as it were, such an object that can be explored as the world can be explored with a camera. It ceases to be an integral discrete object and here Le Corbusier and Hervé understand each other very well and here you need to do a separate lecture for many hours, because this is a very interesting topic. Now they write about this in general. What is important is that it is in Lucien Hervé's photography that finally appears what architectural photographers are using all the time - photographers are starting to use radically oblique light.

You see, this is a concrete surface under a fur coat, you can cut yourself on it. This is due to the fact that light goes along it obliquely. We see different textures of concrete and here these textures constitute the main subject of shooting. This tactility that appears in photography, it was not there before, because before a photograph was such a picture, here is a house somewhere, on some other continent, so we photographed it, transferred it from America to Europe, showed it here and we seem to have a house, but we are looking at it. We have it somewhere in the future. Another of Baldus' rules was to shoot with as long a lens as possible, as far as possible. That is, to make the most impersonal presentation of the work of architecture. The longer the lens we have, the closer the picture is to axonometry. There can be no axonometric picture in photography, because we will always have perspective distortions. But axonometry is such a view of God, it is such a view of a completely detached observer. And here architecture begins to be presented to us as something absolutely tactile and tangible. And this is the great merit of Lucien Herve. Then the era of commercial architectural photography begins, which is associated in America primarily with the names of Erza Stoller and Julias Schulman.

Here is the Guggenheim Museum, all these iconic photographs of iconic buildings. Note that the car in the foreground is here for a reason. It is not just parked here and cannot be removed, as such situations often haunt me here, it stands here on purpose, because this white surface works with the forms and curves of the Guggenheim.

And Julias Schulman, who becomes such a singer of postwar American modernism. Because there are political, social, economic changes in society, which change housing and land prices, people come from the war, the demographic situation there is changing. In short, this whole American home story is changing. And such deliberately simple and minimalist European modernism, which was previously rejected by American society, penetrates America.

But photography is needed here in order to convey this new lifestyle and, in general, even somehow advertise it for people. Perhaps this is the most famous architectural photograph, this is an exemplary house specially built for filming in fact over Mulholland Drive.

For a very long time, Shulman put this photo with an assistant, he sat down the girls. The point here is that for a person familiar with the culture of an American family home, this story is completely non-standard: girls hang over the city, in the night, in some kind of glass cube. We see that this unnatural situation is actually very beautiful. The city is separate, the house is separate. The lighting is not perfect by today's standards, but ... About Julius Schulman is the only architectural photographer to have been featured in a feature-length documentary called Visual Acoustics, with Dustin Hoffman as a voiceover.

This is a very funny photograph of Shulman, in which you can see how much this is an advertising character, how far we can see this shot done and set, especially when it is in color. Everything, let's move on to our time. Perhaps one of the most serious classic photographers who now exist and live and work actively is Ellen Binet.

I am happy to know her, for me she is just a living classic, a person who influenced me greatly, but, unfortunately, now Ellen is seized by very strong pessimistic feelings, sensations and, in general, views on what is happening with architectural photography.

Hélène Binet is a close friend of the architects she has worked with, and this is very important. She was a very close friend of Zaha Hadid and therefore I think that Helen Binet's photographs of Zaha Hadid's work are much better than Zaha's architecture. She was very friendly and is friends with Peter Zumthor, here I do not think ... here is parity, let's say that.

Here is this photo taken by everyone who finds himself in the small chapel of Brother Klaus by architect Peter Zumthor near Cologne. There is no public transport. This is such a special place where you have to get away from the nearest railway station on foot 6 kilometers, this is very important, part of such an architectural experience. And this is a photograph taken by everyone who gets there. Each person raises the camera upward, removes this drop - the window. This chapel is arranged in this way: Zumthor made formwork from dead wood found by his students in the surrounding forest, such a hut was built, then it was used as a formwork for concrete, after which the trunks were set on fire and at a certain moment, when the concrete was just coming up, and ash mixed with hardened concrete, and formed an absolutely amazing, unique texture of the interior decoration. After that, glass drops were still inserted there, which are like dew on this ash. This is an amazingly subtle thing. Everyone takes such a photo, this photo can be shown on the screen, you can watch it on the Internet, but you will not see it. It is remarkable in that it is shot in a large format and it looks only in print. I work mostly with digital now and I understand very well what I have to lose by not working with film. Helene Binet is one of the last true classical architectural photographers, she doesn't even have a camera on her phone. It is very important for her that she does not have a digital device for recording information.

This photo is the Columbus Museum, the Archdiocese Museum in Cologne, also by the architect Peter Zumthor, and this is a picture that you will never see with your eyes, because this is a reflection, this is a glare on the ceiling, such a hair texture, glare from the sun reflecting from a puddle, which is on the street, behind this perforated wall. You will never see such a picture, because this is the result of a long exposure, again shooting on film. This is one of Zumthor's iconic photographs, one of his favorites.

Further, such an era of close connection between contemporary art and architectural photography begins. Hiroshi Sugimoto, a renowned Japanese painter and photographer, captures contemporary architecture in a very sharp way. Thus, he seems to imitate this state of relaxed attention. A state at the edge of the field of view, such a lateral view of an important architecture. On the one hand, this is important, but on the other hand, it is not abrupt.

Unfortunately, such sharpness happens only on large-format film, and you also need to watch it not on a small screen, but in a book or even better at an exhibition. And of course, the most important commercial figure in our profession now is Ivan Baan.

This is a Dutch architectural photographer who recently sold his last apartment and lives only in airplanes and hotels and travels around the world and takes pictures of everything that appears to be starry and expensive. I say that he seems to be baptizing. Until he christened the building, it does not seem to exist. But Baan arrived, who flies around the world like an angel, and the building began to exist. This is a very important figure.

This is his photo of New York after Hurricane Sandy in November 2012, when half of the city was without electricity. At first Baan thought to take a car, but it was impossible to rent a car in New York these days, it was easier to rent a helicopter, cheaper than renting a car. I just remember, because at that time I was lying in Brooklyn with a terrible headache, and a real photographer at that time flew in a helicopter and took pictures of architecture. He then arranged an auction and sold, I think, 20 copies for a lot of money, which went to the fund to help victims of Sandy. Ivan Baan is an interesting character.

Because in fact I have already said that it became customary to shoot architecture in the 80s and 90s without people at all. This is a deserted, dry, such as a thing in itself, beautiful architecture with some kind of inner beauty, which has no scale, which you will not understand what it really is - a piece of jewelry or a sculpture. Such a picture took possession of the entire architectural press in the 80s and owned it until the middle of the two thousandth. And in fact, Ivan Baan was one of those people who, taking all these lifeless wonderful pictures - he knows how to do it very well, made quite recently, somewhere in the middle of the 2000s, a real revolution. He began not only to photograph people in architecture, but began to drive people into architecture.

As I was told, when Ivan Baan comes to Herzog & de Meuron to shoot new architecture, all young architects are driven away, they have to bring costumes with them, several shifts, he has a people assistant who checks clothes, does a casting, and then these young architects portray from office workers to passers-by on Baan's set.

Yes, this is how Ivan Baan shoots without people, Fondation Louis Vuitton, this is a classic architectural photography that you don't have to sign. Basically, everyone is shooting the same now. You know there is archdaily.com, the premier architecture media, and you rarely actually see an interesting person in architectural photography there. Basically, all the architecture there is also filmed according to the canons.

This is a project in Caracas. What it is?

In a nutshell: this is a giant 40-something-story office building that was unfinished. They began to build it on the rise of the Venezuelan economy, which was in the late 90s, then it was abandoned, and then a terrible economic crisis began in Venezuela and the building was taken over by the homeless. And this is a gigantic squat, in which its own economy, its own sociology was gradually formed. For example, they somehow forwarded electricity from neighboring match lighting, but they did not have an elevator, but they had a ramp that ran up to the 22nd floor and there were special inside-house taxi-lifts that carried people. Baan studied it from bottom to top, including some curiosities, for example, grandmother, who was raised to the 34th floor. She is paralyzed and everyone knows that grandmother will never come down from the 34th floor, that she will live and die there. They have their own shops and cafes there. Then Ivan Baan removes this episode in 2012, gets his Golden Lion, he and the group…. This is such a theoretical architectural research group, well, in general, close to the Archkod of Almaty, working all over the world, they get their Golden Lion, it becomes public, after that in 2014 this building gains world fame, because Brody from the TV series is hiding there. Homeland ". He gets there, it seems in the third season, the whole world finds out about the building, after which the corrupt Venezuelan police find out about him, after which a terrible sweep takes place using the army and everyone is expelled from there. And that's it, now this skeleton stands separately, behind barbed wire, and no one lives there and there is no life there. Here is this strange story, in fact, architectural photography served as a catalyst for this whole story.

I am bringing this to the fact that now, at the present time, architectural photography is not clear where. On the one hand, it is done by the orders of architects and is as close as possible to renderings - what does the architect want? The architect wants to show the public that the render that he sold to the customer can actually be photographed, in fact exists as a fact. This is a custom photo. Historical architecture photography certainly remains in its niche. This is what I now prefer to do for the most part. And photography is in fact not critical - neither as a school, nor as an aesthetics. And whether there is a place here for a photographer, whether there is a place for aesthetics, whether there is a place for a new language, is unknown. Therefore, we have already finished with what we started with, only in a different way. This was my introduction, sorry for some confusion, into the history of architectural photography.

Now I will show my project. This is the first work that I did not commissioned by architects, but partly on my own initiative. This is the Chertanovo series, 1999, which was made for the exhibition of a series of exhibitions, which was curated by the architect, artist Yuri Avvakumov, one of the founders of the paper architecture movement in the 80s. It was a series of exhibitions called "24". There is still a website 24. Photo, it has survived. By the way, Avvakumov and I did the design. This was Avvakumov's idea, a series of twenty-four exhibitions that opened every second Thursday of every month. Each exhibition had 24 photographs, and they had to be the authorship of either a photographer taking pictures of architecture or an architect who photographs or an artist who also works with photography and architecture. And each of the invited authors was free to choose their own topic.

And I just at that time moved to Chertanovo, but not to Severnoye, this is an experimental district, an exemplary residential area, which was designed in the 70s in the workshop of Mikhail Posokin Sr. One of such objects of post-war modernism quite important for Moscow. It was built for a very long time and badly, and it was built only in the early 80s. But all the same, some basic architectural ideas embedded in it, they are there. In particular, one of these ideas is that it looks very close to the English brutalism of the 60s. There's Smithsonian ideas in general pretty much to blame, even in this photo. For example, the fact that artificial relief is being introduced into the area.

For example, this hill, under which construction waste is buried. But this is the favorite slide of local children. Duplex apartments, artists' studios upstairs, by the way, artists-architects are still working there. In general, this is an area that was planned as an exemplary communist, by that time it was clear that the communism promised by Khrushchev in the 80s would not take place, each family would not be given a separate apartment either. And in general there are minor problems with socialism. But on the other hand, the idea was that it was possible to build separate districts that would be exemplary, such as enclaves of a new way of life. In particular, in northern Chertanovo, a vacuum waste disposal system, which was made by the Swedes, is still in operation. In general, everything is serious there. It was still more serious. For example, the halls on the first floors are non-residential in all buildings. According to the initial projects, which were developed by sociologists together with architects, there were refrigerators in the halls, in which a list of groceries could be left to the concierge, groceries were bought, and by the evening they lay in the refrigerator on the shelf of this tenant. But in fact, all this was built rather poorly, the structure of the separation of traffic flows and people, close to that advocated by Le Corbusier and Siam, this horizontal stratification, has already ceased to work during the construction phase. That is, part of the streams of cars was allowed over the ground instead of letting everything underground, so it is now impossible to park there, it is impossible to bring anything to the entrance, everything is packed with cars and there is no way to fight it, because underground automobile communications are blocked. But I was amazed by what I finally saw in this architecture ... if it used to represent for me everything that I did not like in this gray, Soviet, very poor, and limited past life. And architecture for me was like a sign of that life. Then I started to travel around the world, I started looking at what was happening in Europe in the 50-60s, and I suddenly began to understand that there is this connection and that it is necessary to talk about it. And it so happened that it was in the early 2000s that the architectural community and journalists first began to talk about post-war modernism, and this topic suddenly turned on.

Nikolai Malinin, my co-author on the book, attributes this to me. In fact, this is not the case. I was in the right place at the right time and did the right thing. And so I made such a series about the existence of this area in an unadorned, but at the same time somewhat romanticized, perhaps in such a way. The curator Avvakumov then wrote in the water text for the exhibition that Brodsky said that if a neutron bomb is dropped on Leningrad, which destroys all living things, leaves the entire infrastructure, then St. Petersburg will remain. But Palmin proved that if a neutron bomb is dropped on Severnoe Chertanovo, then Severnoe Chertanovo will remain. That's about such a heavenly Chertanovo, devoid of inhabitants, such a failed paradise, I did. In fact, this work is extremely important to me. And it was this work that pushed me to what I am doing here now, what I am trying to do in Moscow with architecture, as it were, deprived of public attention. I am very interested in the topic of the conscious direction of the flow of my attention, my vision, and not only my own, but through myself and other people, to what is deprived of this attention.

Architectural photography is a special genre of photography, the task of which is to obtain beautiful pictures of the exterior of buildings, structures, bridges, monuments and architectural ensembles. High-quality photographs of architecture are often used today for promoting real estate, creating documentary reports and advertising brochures. In order to capture the beauty of architectural structures and buildings, the photographer has to work with perspective, lighting and choosing the right point to shoot. Therefore, architectural photography requires serious training and experience.

The main purpose of architectural photography is to photograph buildings, structures or entire architectural complexes in the most attractive form for the viewer. To convey the true beauty of a building or its architectural details, the photographer has to find the right composition and use the lighting conditions wisely. There are two directions in architectural photography - documentary and artistic photography. Most often, it is documentary photography that is used, which allows you to most realistically and accurately convey the shape, color, size of the building, elements of its decor or the texture of the finish. Thus, documentary architectural photography allows the viewer to examine in detail the size and appearance of the building, its unique features and characteristics. It requires binding to the terrain or neighboring buildings and the exact observance of all proportions. But there is also an artistic direction in architectural photography. In this case, the realism and veracity of the architectural object fade into the background. The main thing for the photographer is the desire to fill the photo with emotions and mood, to give the objects of architecture a certain artistic expression.

Photography of architecture is a very popular trend in modern photography. A documentary reflection of architectural objects with maximum realism is always necessary for construction companies. They use such photographs to prepare reporting documents and tenders in regulatory authorities, as well as to draw up a passport of the object. Artistic architectural photography is in demand by advertising firms and real estate agencies in order to "promote" a particular piece of architecture in the market. Such images can play a decisive role in the development of an advertising campaign. In this case, architectural photography is not limited to photographing the facades and the entire building. The photographer often has to capture individual elements of architecture, the view of the courtyard or landscaping of the surrounding area. All this can later be used to produce printed or electronic advertising materials.

Architectural photography has its own challenges. In particular, in such a survey, strict verticality and straightness of vertical and straight lines are of fundamental importance. To prevent the buildings from appearing "overwhelmed" to the human eye, the photographer must constantly monitor the plane of the photographic material or the camera matrix, which must be vertical and in no case tilted. The optical axis of the camera lens must be horizontal. Failure to do so can result in unpleasant perspective distortions. In practice, keeping the lines parallel and vertical is not easy enough. To do this, the photographer has to choose the farthest point to shoot the building. Another challenge facing an architectural photographer is choosing the right angle. Nowadays, in a dense urban environment, it can be difficult to find the right angle from which you can capture an object as advantageously as possible. The building is often covered by neighboring houses or a busy avenue. As a result, the building is sorely lacking in space, forcing the photographer to use a wide-angle or ultra-wide-angle lens during shooting. It is the angle and the choice of the shooting point by distance and height that determine the overall composition of the frame, its perspective and the ratio of the plans. Therefore, professional photographers often have to look for a suitable angle for shooting a building for a long time, climbing fire escapes or entering neighboring houses. A high-quality picture will be obtained only when the subject fits completely into the frame, it is well lit and looks good against the rest of the background. And at the same time, there should be no perspective distortion in the picture.

Lighting plays an important role in architectural photography. Working in his own studio, the photographer can control the light himself, achieving the ideal direction and type of lighting to create artistic expression in the picture. When photographing architectural objects, this is by definition impossible. Therefore, when organizing architectural photography, one has to take into account the nature of natural lighting at different times of the day. In particular, it is not recommended to shoot architectural objects on cloudy days or cloudy weather, because chiaroscuro does not allow you to convey the exact shape and texture of the building. Insufficient contrast leads to distortion of the object's shape, and too strong contrast, in turn, leads to the loss of certain details in shadows or light. Therefore, it is far from all the same in what weather and what time of day a building or other architectural object is photographed. It is believed that the best option for shooting is the position of the sun at an angle of about 25-30 ° to the plane of the building. In this case, soft shadows appear in the frame, which increase the relief of the image. Similar lighting conditions occur in the morning and evening hours. It is at this time of the day that professional photographers who shoot architecture most often go in search of new interesting and beautiful shots. Night photography of architectural objects also looks attractive, when the night sky is illuminated by lanterns and headlights of passing cars. Side sunlight is best for photographing relief surfaces and decorative elements of a building.

A popular solution in architectural photography is black and white photography. It allows you to favorably emphasize the beauty and features of a particular architectural object. Stunning artistic effects can be achieved by applying various color filters. In architectural photography, quite often it is necessary to resort to post-processing of the resulting images in graphic editors to achieve the desired results. With the help of digital processing, you can demonstrate the beauty of a building in the best possible way or emphasize the surrounding landscape.

The secret of success in architectural photography is attention to every detail and careful preparation. The photographer has to wait patiently for the architectural object to "show" itself in an ideal way. To achieve this goal, sometimes you have to spend more than one hour finding the right angle, looking for interesting architectural details and waiting for the right lighting. But the result of shooting is often much more valuable than the time spent.

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