Documentation Images
While most of my photography concentrates on architectural design presentation, most of my clients want to include images that document various functional aspects of architectural projects or to show how they have created solutions to practical problems . I agree, and do not consider these images as deserving less care or less effort than design photographs. I make every effort to insure that my clients get the best quality for all the images.
Wolf Prix, of the Vienna firm Coop Himmelb(l)au described the concept of this project as "chess pieces" on a board. I was excited to photograph the back of the library where the entrance | exit was not visible to show the remarkable cone shape with the elliptical pattern of tiles. Sometimes it's all about form and detail.
This facility is designed for improvisational theater, and television, with a handsome pattern of acoustical tiles on the wall. The lighting on the wall is mine – floor lights that were later removed in post.
I should appear in the mirror at the end of the room, because I could see myself in it while I was shooting. But I took myself out in post!
I had to set my tripod up high for this, and climb a ladder to shoot it. It took some time working all this out, and when I climbed up the last time and took hold of the cable release of my camera to make the picture, a luxury yacht shot out from behind the apartment building at left, going full speed across the water. My reflexes worked in my favor, and I pushed the button with exact (and lucky) timing. If I had wanted to set this shot up, it would have taken walkie talkies communicating with the captain, multiple tries, and at least half a day to pull it off.
The contrast ratio in this image was extreme and difficult to render while keeping a natural feeling of a room filled with natural light. Most photographers use High Dynamic Range processing to deal with this situation, as I did. When I use HDR, I do not want it to show and I go to extremes to make sure that it doesn't. HDR is a tool used to keep detail in the extreme highlights while maintaining detail in the shadows. The error that is too often made, is that it yields an artificial look to the image, and the subject of the work becomes the way the image was processed.
My father, a landscape designer, used to take me to a certain shopping center designed by a landscape architect with the last name of Martini. He always admired the fact that Martini had designed a parking lot with sidewalks running between the parked cars so people did not have to walk with their children in the traffic – safer, more convenient, and so much more civilized. I thought of my Dad when I shot this image.
