It’s a year ago this week that we decided to sell our beloved apartment and try to buy an equally beloved house. At the time we didn’t realise that it would take us 8 months to close the sale and another 2 months to close the purchase, but while that seems like a long time, it is clear now that we were lucky to sell when we did.
When the auctioneer came to value our apartment, she began to make arrangements to organize a photographer to visit also, but I told her that I would take the photographs myself. The main reason for this, while it would be an interesting photographic exercise also, was that I would have total control over the photographs – how they were composed, what time of day they were taken at, how the rooms were laid out, and how, in general, they represented the apartment.
I’ve blogged previously about one of the internal shots that I took for that purpose, and today I’m posting the external shot that graced the front out the marketing brochure. With that internal shot I carefully arranged some furniture to enhance the feeling of space, but for an exterior shot it’s not possible to have that level of control. What I could control was the composition of the shot, and the time of day that I took it at.
My first attempt at an exterior shot was actually around the other side of the building, where the front door to our apartment was. We were keen to emphasize that ours was an own-door apartment, and so I felt it was important that this would be obvious from the exterior shot. The auctioneer didn’t agree, and asked me to reshoot from the other side of the building.
She was probably right to get an alternate shot. For a start the other side faced south, so it would be well lit. I chose to photograph it in the morning with the sun in the south west, which is camera right in the photograph above. This creates a bit of side light which is flattering for the building, showing a little texture in the brick work, avoiding any flare in the glass, and giving a 3-dimensional feel to the building. And if there’s anything you want in an apartment building that you’re thinking of living in, it’s a 3rd dimension!
I was fortunate that it was turning out to be a sunny day, and the sky had some blue in it. I metered for the sky, and then exposed to have that about a stop and a half over exposed. This would keep it nice and bright, but hopefully limit it from being too blown out. The building came up nicely with this exposure. Naturally I was checking this on the back of the camera as I shot.
My main motivation in choosing this framing was to try to have at least a hint of our apartment, which was on the ground floor at the back-left of the building – if you look closely it’s balcony is barely visible. At least with a sliver of it in the frame I could say that this was an exterior shot of the apartment. To be fair, I doubt if anyone would have thought they were buying the whole building anyway.
The photograph does illustrate clearly the problem with taking architectural shots with standard lenses – namely that of converging verticals. Even last night when I was processing this image for posting, I struggled to decide on when the image was straight. There are two ways around this. The expensive way is to use a tilt shift lens, designed specifically to avoid converging vertical lines and so ideally suited to architectural photography (though those tilt-shift lenses can produce nice creative effects too). The cheap way is to use photoshop to alter the perspective and realign the verticals. The third option of course is the lazy one of doing nothing. That’s what I chose to do here.
I have yet to get around to taking some shots of the new house, which we are in for almost 2 months now – it’s definitely on the to-do list, but sadly other things – like unpacking – are still higher up the list.
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