The First World Problems of Architectural Photography
California is massive. That’s stating the obvious. Getting out there and documenting its architecture has proven to be a different challenge than in Miami. South Florida’s daily deluges frequently sent me home kicking and cursing while the rain washed away my best-laid plans. You’d drive, set up, wait for the right light and pray. If the rain didn’t send you running for the hills, then the clouds blocking the sun would make your presence a waste. I’ve written in the past about the maddening, Sisyphean-like torment such conditions could inject into an architectural photographer. This could go on for weeks before you got the right light, so every day was an internal back and forth: “Do I endure? Or do I give up, take the shot as is, and try to fix it post?”
Southern California’s weather is thankfully more predictable. It’s clear and sunny 90% of the time, except in San Diego where late afternoon clouds are always an option and the weather apps are completely useless. Anyone care to wager what the major shooting hurdle is out here?
Distance + Traffic + Gas Prices = “Please don’t make me drive “
Everything worth shooting or seeing in this state is over an hour away. Miami was a small city, so even if I had to go home with nothing, at least “home” was rarely more than ten or fifteen minutes away since I lived in the heart of the city. SoCal is comprised of both L.A. and Riverside Counties. Everything is spread out. And the traffic is as brutal as advertised, so it makes it harder to scout ahead of time and be more precise. Google Earth can only get you so far. Almost everything I’ve shot thus far has required a 1/4 tank of gas at minimum, and I’ve spent as much as three hours one way to or from due to various issues with traffic. After such a day, I rarely ever want to repeat it anytime soon, so driving is the major deterrent that makes hinders consistency. A real moment killer. It has changed the way I do things when photographing architecture.
I have had to silence my internal perfectionist.
learned that I just have to pick a day to drive and expect to get my shots right then and there, no matter what the conditions are like. I do whatever scouting I can ahead of time, but the circumstances have forced me to get dialed in quicker and increase the overall pace of my workflow. On a recent trip to the UCLA main campus ( a 2.5-hour drive for me on a good day), I speed-walked around, dropping points along the way like I was marking targets in Call of Duty, and did my best to get as many shots as I could despite the constantly changing lighting conditions.
In the past, I might go to downtown Miami five or six days a week and pick one building to shoot and be happy to come home with 1-3 stellar images. I could spend hours obsessing over one composition because time was a luxury. I’d lock my shot, put on my AirPods, and enjoy the meditative, blissful process of watching the light shape, carve and bounce off the textures of a building.
This new workflow is a complete 180. It’s definitely not one I care to adopt long-term, but I do appreciate the stimulation it’s applying to regions of my brain that have probably atrophied from lack of use. I usually get my fill of that hectic style of shooting when working on jobs for the cruise ships, which are their own beasts to tame. But given the circumstances of a global pandemic, those haven’t exactly been pouring in. It’s important to be able to think on your feet, pivot, and adapt. It’s even fun at times: kind of like when they used to have those contests on TV where you could watch people run around stores and they’d have 5 minutes at most to fill a shopping cart.
The landscaping in this shot was in the middle of some heavy TLC. Nothing some tedious Photoshop work can’t fix.
Enter Redlands University.
College campuses are among my favorite locations to shoot. There’s always a surplus of interesting architecture to shoot, and they tend to have massive endowments that consistently fund new construction.
I arrived at Redlands one afternoon on a whim with the original intention of meeting my friend Cameron Mackey for some whiskey. But a drive around town quickly enchanted me with the charms of old Victorian-style homes and the kinds of college buildings I’d often seen on TV but never in a person living in Miami, where they tend to be much newer. Cam was sport enough to help me film a bts while I embarked on an impromptu shoot.
The shot of the main administration building has this incredible streak of sunlight that I caught just in time for my first shot. But the sun was moving quickly, and by the time we walked around and discovered the second location, it had moved behind some adjacent hills and we lost the shadow. My old life would have given me the luxury of just “coming back tomorrow.” But distance would once again deter me. I knew damn well I wasn’t going to pay for more of that atrociously expensive California gas and sit another 1.5 to 2 hours in traffic the next day. I’d lose the momentum and likely wouldn’t return anytime soon.
So I opted to fix it in post. You can watch the process in the videos above, but essentially I used the first photo I took as a reference to accurately recreate the streaks of light on the facade of the building using Photoshop’s masking and blend mode tools.
The final shot was taken on a whim as we were walking back to the car eager to try a new whiskey bar that opened in town. The landscaping was being renovated, and once again I knew I wasn’t going to come back in three months when they were done. I accepted my fate and prepared to spend hours in photoshop adding grass and foliage to the scene.
It’s gotta be done.
That’s the lesson I am constantly learning: Architectural photography is great for hardening one’s resolve. You can always count on multiple variables beyond your control: scheduling issues, delayed construction, bad weather, obstructive elements, etc. You get a few minutes to curse and pout, but then you knuckle down and figure it out.