How to Photograph a Landscape Architecture Image

How to Photograph a Landscape Architecture Image Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the photo of the week on the Daily Critique. This week’s photo of the week was submitted by Shian who is an advanced photographer from Virginia. Shian shot this with the Nikon D15 12 to 24 zoom at 16 mm for the effective focal length, just 24 mm and at ISO 200 and F63 expose it far for two seconds and on the back story Shian says she shot this on the James River, very early in the morning about 7:30 a.m. on an overcast day and she said she just really like the start quality of the composition. I love this image. One of the things that I love about it right away is just how much of an illusion is created here that I can move through the image. We have been talking about this a little bit lately, so we just come back to it again today. We are thinking about a still photograph in terms of planes of movement that describes the planes of movement during image that we would talk about if we’re doing cinematography. In cinematography, we talk about the XY and Z planes of movement or of the XX, as Y-axis, to ZX, as XX, is this horizontal movement. Y-axis is up and down and Z is the illusion that you can move through. And that is just so palpable here. You have the converging diagonals of the railing that lead out and converge to this point in a distance, and then the fact that it is a railing and it is a path way. It’s not just a quality of line. It’s the subject matter itself and it’s also the way that light moves particularly on the base of this pathway or walkway, a very, very powerful way in addition to something like converging diagonals to create the illusion of movement through on the Z axis is to have what cyan has here. As far as light on the subject like this, a leading one, dark in the front, moving out to light and you get dark again and then light and then dark. That sort of rolling contrast particularly with the starting out darken the front and giving it a feeling of really opening up in the background and really creates this feeling of a far room, a distance room moving through that we can get to in the image. I love the depth here and the other things I really love about this image is just the powerful juxtaposition of the reality that seems very stark, very metallic, almost futuristic and for me the texture here on the walkway and in the metal railing and the super structure here of the bridge, all of this to me feels very futuristic. I mean I can almost sort of think of archetype of words that sort of suggests another time period, select the word monolith. I’m sort of getting from this and then you have this very natural environment that sort of comes in and encroaches in the spaces. It seems very futuristic. The feeling over the trees and the real filigreed line of the limbs, the river bed in the water so I just love the way those two ideas are playing off with each other. The other thing I love about this image is that there is a very, very powerful sense of symmetry that you get when you look at it. There is also a level of sort of literal and then almost abstract in some kinds of ways, but one of the things I love about the symmetry in these images and in some sense from a distance, you sort of get a sense of perfect symmetry on a perfect centering of the main subject. But then as you move through here and you start to look at the image closer, there are things that break up the symmetry but in a very subtle way. And that seems to draw me deeper and deeper in to the image that I sort of start to enjoy the subtle imperfections of the symmetry we have. The limbs coming in over here and it seems like a reputation of that over here, but you do not have the limbs. You have basically, what it looks like etching that is sort of rhymes the limbs on this side. It’s a pretty strong symmetry here and here, but then it gets broken here with this little bit comes down and this edge is straight. You’ve got graffiti here that is pretty powerful, nothing to sort a balance over here maybe with the exemption to this. This is a lot more dominant in terms of the sort of arch way of the tree and the right hand side and not so much on the left. The same thing is happening down here in the water, just whatever this is, whether it tides or snow or just the bank coming in. It’s happening in a way that is subtlety different from side to side. Just to allow this image for me, something about this feeling of sort of this futuristic and hard and cold kind of environment and then the softness of the trees are coming in is very, very evocative and I get just a real strong sense of wanting to literally be able to walk into the space and have this real quiet sort of experience, just being there alone. This image was really evokes a feeling in me that I am there, that I could be there. Beautiful image, you know I wanted to sort of how to have a runner up image today. It’s very different. I have been looking a very strong color image here in just a second but similar in that image has been sort of bulls eyed and centered and so I wanted to in addition to looking at Shian’s beautiful sort of architectural landscape image you wanted to look at this very stark and very brilliant colored image from Bob who is a beginning photographer from Florida. Bob shot this is the Nikon D70s and effective focal length with a 980 mm. So, it’s a pretty long telephoto here and shutter is in very early light, 40 minutes before the sun came up, an article twilight which is part of the reason we’re getting these colors here. It’s a great time of day to get a lot of color in a real dramatic color gradient. I have shot this F18 400 and this file was exposed for 15 seconds. This is sunshine’s skyway bridge outside of Tampa. One of the things that Bob asked about in the submission form was, is the bull’s eye working? And I think it is, and in the same way that it works in Shian’s shot. When we’re shooting architecture and you’re shooting something, let us say like a church or a court house, structures that tend to have an enormous amount of symmetry then I think it can work very well to photograph these things, just like they are being shown here in Shian’s shot. In Shian’s shot, the feeling of tonal movement and the diagonals really help to get us around or past the idea that things have been centered, and in Bob’s shot, you have a tonal and color gradient. They really create quite a bit of a depth on the Z-axis moving through. I think the other thing that’s doing that in this image is diagonal movement. You got both of the major diagonals that are implied here even though we don’t have the whole quality of line. I talked quite a bit about this. We have two ideas of quality of line. We have actual quality of line and we have implied movement that can create a feeling of moving on a line and I think they’re playing off of the major diagonals with the structure of the bridge. That was to break things up and you know it’s just not perfectly symmetrical. It’s another image where there are subtle differences on either side. When you’re looking at this area of the image and this area of the image from left to right, when you looked at what’s happening with the reflection here, stronger here not so strong here, this part of substructure of the bridge is stronger here and so on and so forth. And again this gradient back here, light coming in to the real intense color and then how it’s broken up creates an image where I can look at it and see the symmetry kind of order, but there is a moving and look closer to image. There are enough things that are subtlety different to really bring my eye around and really enjoy sort of all parts of the image, two very beautiful images, very different obviously, just in terms of how dramatic this color is. I have to say in Shian’s black and white image but very beautiful images. I really must have big thank you to both Bob and Shian for sharing these images with us on the Mindful Eye’s Photo of the Week in the Daily Critique. I hope everybody has a great weekend.