ARCHITECTURE

Photographing property can take a lot of time Taking an actual photograph may only take a few seconds.

Since lighting and perspective is everything, you will often have to wait for the right conditions.

It is common to photograph different parts of a property at different times of day.

Dusk photos are a very good time to create an external photo that creates a cosy welcoming feel to a hotel.

Some rooms have better quality lighting as the sun's angle changes through the day.

Some rooms are better being photographed at night or with the curtains closed.

Wide Depth of Field

In all but a few cases, you will wish for a very wide depth of field. You will be aiming at f22 and greater (for specialist lenses).

Most of the time you will be photographing with low ISO settings and in aperture priority.

1/30th second f22 ISO 200

To create high quality work you will need a minimum of the following:

Quality Heavy Tripod
Quality Wide Angle Zoom Lens
Cable Release or Timer for Shutter Release

Like all types of photography, you can achieve good results with a modest equipment list.

Prime or Shift-Tilt lenses can greatly increase your imagery's quality & reduce production, however for beginner to intermediate level photography these are luxury items.

Camera Phones

The very latest mobile phones have cameras with a greater quality and resolution than professional cameras as little as five years ago.

Control is the key to any high quality photography.

Phone cameras often have a fixed aperture, creating limitations to mobile phone architecture work as it reduces the control you have over the image.

This does not mean that great results can not be achieved, just that there are more limitations.

Since the bracketing of exposure and HDR photography is often vital for quality architecture imagery, a very good tripod is absolutely vital.

Many mobile phones also have very good HDR algorithm's built in.

These take multiple images and merge them together automatically, so (yet again) a tripod and timer is absolutely vital for any low light bracketed imagery.

Mixed Lighting

When photographing a room or venue is is very common to have warm lighting inside and natural daylight coming in from the windows. With your camera set to auto colour, commonly the daylight portion will have a strong blue tint.

In these cases, post production to colour correct the mixed lighting is needed. Often, the adjustment colour brush will become your best friend when editing these images.

HDR

High Dynamic Range (HDR) is key to capturing both the highlights and the dark shadows.

This can be done both in-camera and using post production.

Many modern camera's have a HDR function built in, the very latest ones now do a good job. Most photographers will choose to bracket the exposure of their photos. They then create a HDR montage using specialist software.

In recent years the quality of this has improved greatly.

The Adobe Lightroom HDR system is both simple to use and very effective. Other specialist HDR software can give you more control as your experience grows.