Shoot great buildings

Focus on your composition

• Use the basic rules, but when shooting a building from afar, pay special attention to your foreground, middle ground and background.
• Leverage roads, pathways that lead to your building.
• Use elements to frame up your buildings, Branches, other buildings can help you frame the subject. Lay low to exaggerate shots and converging lines
• Fitting a whole building could be difficult to fit on the frame. Make sure you set your camera upwards to accomplish this. Trying to fit the entire building could drive the verticals to lean in. Some people don't like this, but it could be fixed later on post processing, also some specific lenses can help you fix this on the camera.
• As for the times, be careful on the lighting. As many times dawn and dusk will allow for the best shots, during midday harsh shadows could ruin your shots making them look flat. This could be a good time to focus on specific architectural details you might be interested, or focus your shooting indoors.
• The use of a warm up filter could help, but this could be done on post processing. Make sure you shoot RAW to get freedom on setting up the right WB
• If you are shooting near a body of water, try and get the reflection of the building on the water. This works best on tranquil waters as any movement from animals or wind could cause the reflection to be ruined. Use a polarizer to bring out the colors, but use it wisely to ensure you dont eliminate the reflection. If its windy a good idea is to go for an abstract shot on the reflection only and get the reflection trough the water ripples
• If your building has some stained glass, this is better shot under a overcast day. If you are taking the entire window, then meter carefully from the bright spot set your exposure to manual and recompose.
• A good idea is to focus on the details. Dont only look for the detail, but looks for patterns from stone work, pathways, etc. Usually a tripod here is a good idea
• If you are shooting at night, ensure to meter for the highlights and watch out for your white balance.
• Indoor buildings are a good target to try HDR due to their uneven lighting.

Look for interesting shapes	Focus on architectural details
When lighting is not good, indoor shooting can generate lots of opportunities	Try out HDR indoors and play with different lighting opportunities

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