This weekend I went out on photo walk #3. I wanted to capture images of and related to architecture to use as a theme for my HCP workshop. I thought I would mainly wind up capturing glass and concrete skyscrapers – I got quite of few of those. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how many buildings have some really neat embellishments and decorative ornamentation. On my walk down Travis street from Leeland, I immediately started seeing the Esperson building coming up. I knew that was a building I would want to spend some time with.

As I continued down Travis on my way to the Esperson, the first interesting building I came across was the 1921 Humble Oil building that is now the Courtyard Houston Downtown. Looking up I was struck by the really neat ornamentation on the eaves of the building. I wonder how often, if ever, the people walking on the streets everyday look up to notice it. From that point on, I was pretty much looking up for the rest of the afternoon. I was able to get good compositions from the moldings, columns, eaves, and dentils of a number of buildings. The 5 hours I spent this weekend only got me down and up Travis and a few surrounding blocks. Downtown Houston and what remains of some of its historical buildings will definitely be the subject for future walks.

What I learned:

Wide angle lenses are great. Converging vertical lines are a pain in the @$$. I use Lightroom 2.6 as my catalogue and image editor. It doesn’t have some of the straightening tools that CS4 apparently has. There are some techniques you can use while on site to minimize the trouble of leaning skyscrapers. One is keeping the image plane perfectly parallel to the primary subject. This is great if you can get far enough in front of the building, or if you can find an elevated position so that you can shoot the building head on. In the urban canyon landscape, it’s not as easy as that.

I just decided to embrace those leaning buildings and in some cases even tried to exaggerate them for dramatic effect. Standing at the base of a building and shooting straight up gave me some pleasing results. There is a standalone program called PTLens that has tools for correcting lens abberations and vertical converging lines and has a free trial. I plan on giving it a test drive. It’s only 25.00 for a full license compared to the expense of CS4.

Monochrome makes architectural details pop. I found this to be the case when I did the TMC Construction Photo Walk. I got a suggestion from Dion McInnis to try a yellow filter (or CS4/Lightroom equivalent) or some sepia toning. I tried the Antique Grayscale setting in Lightroom and was really pleased with the results. It not only minimized the distractions of the relatively dull true colors, it pumped up the contrast and made all the detail in the ornaments and embellishments really stand out. It also made parallel lines and geometric patterns come to the foreground as stronger elements than they otherwise were. Of course it gave a nostalgic look to the older buildings, but it works equally well with the modern structures.

When looking at some architectural drawings for inspiration, I noticed how they were often drawn at “street elevations” or at eye level. Columns and other details were often drawn alone without any other reference to the overall structure. When cropping my images in post processing I tried to mimic compositions that architects use in their drawings to pull out just some of the ornamental elements. I think I can pull together a couple of sets of two and three related images for a successful representation of my theme for my Words and Images assignment.

Lastly, while the glass boxes can seem at first glance uninteresting, they often provide great opportunities to capture reflected buildings on their surfaces. I was happy to find the Old Gulf building reflected on the mirror glass surface of this nondescript building.

You can see all the images from the set in the gallery. I took over 200 images on the walk and only have about a quarter of the ones I like uploaded so far. I’ll add the others over the next couple of days.