February 2020 - everything was cool, except we were on the verge of shutting everything down for 2 weeks, 2 weeks that dragged into 2 years of on and off closures.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is often credited with the idiom “God is in the details” and it still holds today.

Each of these photographs was made at a specific time of day so that the lights of the building would be on but also so that the skies and buildings would be rich with colour and details. 

But taking the pictures was only the beginning.

Each photograph started as a series of multiple exposures at different, yet precise, angles and points of view to capture what the human eye can and cannot see. The bright lights need to be exposed without blowing out the details, the sky needs to be exposed to give dimension and life, the building needs to be exposed to show the richness and details of the architect’s craft and the roads/sidewalks need to ground the building on a solid foundation with blurred signs of life moving through to add drama. 

Each exposure was then blended into a composite of multiple images with layers of varying exposures and individual lines squared up and true to reality (camera lenses are curved and ground-level photographs create the illusion of keystoning and vanishing horizons).

Then the fun detail work begins.

1. removal, or keeping, power lines and poles - the building is the subject

2. removal, or obscuring, signs of construction (pylons are everywhere) and buildings not related to the project

3. removal of promotional, parking, and unimportant street signs and door stickers

4. removal, or adding, people, cars and light trails that accentuate the photographs

5. fixing pavement lines - it seems that most roads have tar lines that distract from the subject 

6. enhancing or replacing skies so that they act as a rich enhancement to the building

7. fine-tooth editing of building lines, saturation, details, sky and light trails.

In order to make the buildings true and realistic, each of these photographs received a minimum of 10 hours of post-production editing.

Frank Fenn