Shooting Building Exteriors

Shooting Building Exteriors

by William Lulow

During the Covid-19 pandemic this year, I have actually made some exterior images that really didn’t involve interactions with people. The interesting thing about shooting buildings with a 35mm-type digital camera, without the benefit of a perspective-correcting lens is that there are several work-arounds to not shooting with a view camera. In the days of film, most of us used view cameras for architectural-type shots because of the built-in distortion controls of those camera’s swings and tilts. For the digital shooters out there who may not know about view cameras, they were really the workhorses of the architectural photography industry. View cameras have separate parts for the lenses and the film that could be adjusted independently to provide distortion control and/or infinite focus. If you wanted to achieve the latter, you would need to tilt the lens board and the film board in such a way that their extensions met at some point below the camera. (They were imaginary lines the photographer could create to make sure their planes met). If you wanted to eliminate the distortion that tilting the camera up would create, all you had to do was to make sure that the film plane was parallel to the building’s vertical lines, make sure the focus was set on infinite and “voila” you would have a perfectly straight, vertical image. I did that many times when I was photographing buildings. Here’s one example:

Here you can see that all the vertical lines of the buildings are just that, vertical. I set my view camera up on my large tripod in the middle of Park Avenue in New York City and adjusted the tilts on the film board so that it was parallel with the lines of the building. When you have to include all of a building, you either have to be far enough away or you have to aim the camera UP a bit. That creates some distortion which the tilting of the film board eliminates.

Along came digital photography and in the beginning, there were digital backs for view cameras. Now there are highly specialized digital backs for a few types of view-type cameras only. Most cost several thousand dollars. And, they are not made for traditional 8×10 or 4×5 view cameras like the ones I used to use. Mamiya makes digital backs for these movable-element cameras which, I believe you need to purchase separately. And, they are in what is called a “645 format” which means that the images are a bit smaller than an old 4×5 sheet of film. So, it represents a substantial investment for a photographer like me, who doesn’t shoot buildings commercially often enough to warrant the expense.

So, there are two basic “work-arounds” to not being able to shoot with a view camera. One is to position the camera high enough and distant enough so that you don’t have to tilt the camera up to include the whole building. The other is a distortion correction filter in Photoshop that often is difficult to use successfully. Here is one of those solutions:

My old view camera tripod can be extended up to eight or nine feet allowing me to crank it up fairly high. And, I need a ladder to be able to look in the viewfinder. Even then, I might have to tilt the camera up just a bit. Here’s the resulting image:

Here the building’s vertical lines are fairly straight and the amount of tilt up is not objectionable. It was taken from far enough away so that I didn’t have to aim the camera up very much.

The other way to correct distortion in digital images is to use the “Lens Correction” filter in Photoshop, under the “Filters” menu. When you do this, you might have to crop the image after you correct the distortion because it crimps it a bit on both sides. So you need to make sure that there is sufficient room in the original image to allow for this. I think that the solution of being far enough away so that you can view the building from a normal angle probably works best. You can always crop the image in post-production later anyway, to get the size image you want.