Architectural Photography

This recent photo shoot took place in Charlottesville, VA for The Gaines Group an Architectural Design firm that designed this office complex on highway 250 just off of I-64 as you enter Charlottesville. Some of these photos will be entered into a contest and a few will be printed and hung in their new offices which are also located on the 3rd floor of this building.

The photo shoot was planned weeks in advance and timing is everything when it comes to outdoor photos. As you know lighting is photography and I arrived on location at 7am to catch the backside of the building as the morning sunlight reflected on the windows. The weather in July can be very bad for shooting as high humidity and frequent thunderstorms can make you loose entire days. As you can see the humidity was low and yet we had some great high cirrus clouds in a very blue sky that added texture and depth to our photos. I then had to wait about 5 hours to take some mid day shots of the front side of the building but the best shots began to happen at about 7 pm and then again after dark when I took the open shutter timed photo. The owner, Ray Gaines, wanted a night shot to show the external lighting on this building and of course the tail light ribbons add some flare too.

Retouching included making lens corrections to remove the normal non-paralex distortion that happens when you do not shoot with a large format camera with a bellows.

Bad spots in the grass and a telephone cable bunker were removed or retouched to improve the overall look as well. Ray choose to leave in the signs to add a few elements of natural habitat.

These photos were taken with a Nikon D5100 using a 18mm-55mm zoom DX lens. Although, my previous D2X or D300s cameras would have been good alternatives I choose the D5100 because it has the highest resolution (16 megapixels) and it did a fine job as expected.