Ottawa City Hall Area
July 28, 2023The making of architectural photographs that fit the entire height and width of the building, with straight lines while having a blue sky and depth in the image.
Find a spot as far back from the building as possible and plant a tripod on firm ground - in the case of this head-on picture, be centred on the middle of the building.
Level the tripod using the tripod gear head levels.
Using tilt-shift (perspective control) 24 mm lens on Nikon D850 , shift lens up to max and tilt camera upwards to be sure enough sky is showing in the frame. Shift lens to bottom to make sure enough ground is showing. Shift lens to middle and manually focus on contrasted window or door edges found in middle of image.
Attach ND FILTER, in this case I am using the ND1000 by Kenko for maximum light reduction so that I can have a long exposure at a low ISO.
Manually set exposure settings then make a series of at least six images at the same exposure in RAW (for Nikon this is call NEF).
Repeat at different exposures.
When done…
Upload into Adobe Lightroom. Photo merge in Panorama form, adjust the keystone effect out of the image, and adjust lighting on different parts of the image using masking tools. Export to an external hard drive as a high-resolution JPG (how high a resolution will depend on final use, in this case the final image was set at 5,000 pixels on long edge by 300 PPI).
Open Adobe Photoshop and, to make the image clean but natural, edit out any unwanted pylons, signs, people, licence plates etc.
Upload to online gallery for sharing and use, I use a service called Format for my Architectural and branding photography websites.
Final edited photographs below.
