Architecture Photography Technique
In this post I thought of shedding some light on a most used technique by architecture photographers.
Before doing so, let me ask you how many times have you been to a famous landmark, monument, building etc and wanted to capture the sight (that brought you there in the first place) sans the people.
Now the thing with a beautiful piece of art or architecture is that you will always find the place crowded with admirers. Given you are perhaps not going to visit again or perhaps just want to take a memorable image of the place but how good will it be if all those tourists, visitors and admirers were not present.
Well hope is around the corner as you can still do that using your camera and lens. Look at the capture below taken at Vivid Sydney, what you don't see is that there were atleast 10 or more people in the shot.
So how did I make them disappear or is it an illusion?
Well, the trick is to use a tripod and select the view you want. Now the important thing to observe is the crowd movement. If there is a bit of movement which usually is the case as people keep moving to explore further or to get a better glimpse or probably have had enough of the viewing pleasure in which case you are in luck to capture an image like the one above. All you need to do is set your camera dial to TV mode (shutter priority) and set the exposure time based on the crowd movement.
For example in my case, I set the exposure to 10 secs as there was enough movement that could be overriden in the camera's memory in 10 secs by the background view which I was after. So it is after all based on your judgement, the more the crowd movement the lesser the exposure time and viceversa.
Ideally I would aim for a minimum of 8 second exposure at night time to hide the people, you can always improvise based on the result. This is one of the cases where more (exposure time) is better but choose wisely or you can blow out the highlights easily. Here is just another pic of the same view.
Here is one more where I purposefully chose to depict the movement of people to give a feel of time lapse.
For using this technique in day light use Neutral density filters. There are a lot to choose from - ND2, ND4, ND8, ND16 or stack them together to get a higher exposure time.
Let me know how you go using this technique and share your pics...happy clicking!!!
Before doing so, let me ask you how many times have you been to a famous landmark, monument, building etc and wanted to capture the sight (that brought you there in the first place) sans the people.
Now the thing with a beautiful piece of art or architecture is that you will always find the place crowded with admirers. Given you are perhaps not going to visit again or perhaps just want to take a memorable image of the place but how good will it be if all those tourists, visitors and admirers were not present.
Well hope is around the corner as you can still do that using your camera and lens. Look at the capture below taken at Vivid Sydney, what you don't see is that there were atleast 10 or more people in the shot.
So how did I make them disappear or is it an illusion?
Well, the trick is to use a tripod and select the view you want. Now the important thing to observe is the crowd movement. If there is a bit of movement which usually is the case as people keep moving to explore further or to get a better glimpse or probably have had enough of the viewing pleasure in which case you are in luck to capture an image like the one above. All you need to do is set your camera dial to TV mode (shutter priority) and set the exposure time based on the crowd movement.
For example in my case, I set the exposure to 10 secs as there was enough movement that could be overriden in the camera's memory in 10 secs by the background view which I was after. So it is after all based on your judgement, the more the crowd movement the lesser the exposure time and viceversa.
Ideally I would aim for a minimum of 8 second exposure at night time to hide the people, you can always improvise based on the result. This is one of the cases where more (exposure time) is better but choose wisely or you can blow out the highlights easily. Here is just another pic of the same view.
Here is one more where I purposefully chose to depict the movement of people to give a feel of time lapse.
For using this technique in day light use Neutral density filters. There are a lot to choose from - ND2, ND4, ND8, ND16 or stack them together to get a higher exposure time.
Let me know how you go using this technique and share your pics...happy clicking!!!
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