Architectural photography

A building is a set of straight lines, and a camera tipped up bends them. The verticals converge, the building leans away, and the picture describes the photographer's neck rather than the architecture. A shifted lens keeps the camera level and moves the view upward instead.

The second problem is range. An interior at midday holds a window ten stops brighter than the far wall. Twilight closes that gap, because the sky outside drops until it matches the lamps inside, and one exposure then holds both.

Say the camera is level and every vertical stays parallel. Name a tilt and shift lens, or say perspective corrected. This one instruction does more than everything else in the prompt.

Choose the hour. Blue twilight with the interior lights on for an exterior, or flat overcast for a facade with no shadow to hide detail.

Balance the interior. Say the window and the room are both correctly exposed, and say the lamps are on. Then close to f/8 and put the camera on a tripod.

Use it for a facade, a stair, an atrium, a room, a bridge, a car park, a housing block. Anything where the lines are the subject.

Leave it alone when you want drama from a low angle. A deliberately tilted camera is a different picture, and it is not this genre.

Cinema lists Tilt-Shift as the miniature effect, a band of blur which makes a real street look like a model. The same lens does the opposite job here. The shift corrects the verticals, and nothing goes soft.

Landscape photography lets the horizon and the ground lead, and it accepts whatever line the land has. Architectural photography answers to the building's own lines.

Still life photography controls one light on a table. Architectural work takes the light of the sky and adds the lights the building already carries.

The perspective control lens reached 35mm cameras in the early 1960s, and it copied the movements a large format 4x5 camera had always had. The twilight exposure is older than that and comes from the same arithmetic: the sky falls about one stop every ten minutes after sunset, so there are roughly twenty usable minutes each evening. RIBA submissions and the interiors press still run on those two rules.

The verticals converge and the building leans back. Say the camera is level and every vertical stays parallel, and name a shift lens.

The window blows out to white and the room goes black. Say twilight, say the interior lights are on, and say the window and the room are both correctly exposed.