bikes and things

There’s an awful lot of crap on our streets. This and the fact that they’re dug up all the time and not repaired drives me mad. Superb series of images from Dave Morris highlighting quite neatly how it impacts on a street.

Last week was probably the toughest I’ve been through in a long time, if not ever. I want to write more shortly but have a lot more thoughts to process before I do and collate a bigger post.

I got to work on Monday and was greeted with the news that Rick had passed away over the weekend. I was, and still am, completely devastated by this and most of last week was a complete daze. A number of things stand out which made me smile though. The incredible messages of condolences, the friends and colleagues sharing ‘Rickisms’ and memories of working for him as well as this Hellman cartoon which eschews his normal acerbic wit for a touching tribute to Rick.

I also found this portrait on the server whilst doing some image research for other images of Rick. Such a great portrait which was shot by James Bolton.

A fantastic image from the back page of a book I caught sight of recently; Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography. Think this book might be on the pay day trip to Amazon tomorrow.

I love the generous size of the studio and the patchwork like background that has been assembled around the model. Would love a set of continuous lights to work with rather than flashes, oh and a big studio too.

I know, another bullshit quote, but I do quite like this. Once you’ve seen how some of the magazines / blogs work you do realise how true this is.

Via Parislemon

I recently took some time off work to go up to the University of Bath to run a series of lectures and workshops with the idea of showing 1st year Architecture students how to take better model photos. We split a year group of 88 into four groups of 22 to enable a smaller group for the workshops. It meant that I had to repeat the lecture and workshop four times but enabled a far better experience for the students.

Rather than just cutting to the chase and giving a brief idea of how to shoot models, I prepared a 35 min lecture on a few wider topics. Firstly the idea that you should take more photos and perhaps try a 365 project as well as why it’s a good idea to have another way of seeing through a passion for photography. Then a bit of a recap of who’s who in the Architectural photography world followed by a discussion and critique of some of their images including understanding the language and rules of photography and how you might then break them. After that we discussed what a bad model photo would look like along with what a good model photo would look like along with a few top tips of how you might go about achieving this.

I tried to stress that you didn’t need all the gear to do some decent photos and that a £3 hot shoe mounted spirit was the best investment you could make along with a tripod.

We then followed up with a review of a series of books and the photography contained within. Some architectural, some purely photographic and some that spanned both. Most of them seemed to enjoy this bit and seemed to have a good appreciation of them too. I was hoping to install an idea of critique of the images they see in these books as well as on sites such as Dezeen and ArchDaily. I’m going to do a list of the main ones we talked about soon with links to Amazon which I’ll update this post with. We then had a coffee break and began to set up the practical session.

Each group of four had a tripod, a black background to install and a piece of white and black foam core. Whilst the lighting wasn’t amazing they all got the white balance right, got the camera level and set about shooting their model. The white was to bounce light in and fill in shadows and the the black was to modify any reflections or reduce glare.

We talked about elevational shots and getting low down into the model rather than being higher and looking down as this is unlikely to be a viewpoint you would ever experience if it was a building. Once we’d spent some time with everyone’s model we went through some basic editing tips, including discussing the benefits of RAW processing, in this case Lightroom with some basic Photoshop work after.

The whole experience was great but thoroughly exhausting and I kind of bored of the sound of my own voice after a while. Hopefully we can do it again next year.

Bizarre that I know the day to some perhaps, but I very clearly remember the 12th March 2008 and starting my current job. Previously I had moved around a bit, doing at most two years in one place before moving on. So it’s been great to finally find a place to settle in to and whilst moments have been hard and challenging, overall I’ve really enjoyed it. As an Architect it’s hard to separate work from your life as it’s intrinsically linked together for most part. I feel very fortunate to have a job I love and enjoy as well as having the responsibility I’ve always wanted. Hopefully they’ll let me stay for another five years.

I’ve been thinking a lot about architectural video recently and looking at different examples. Some good, some bad, some interesting but none match the quality of this little video from one of the Architects at Studio MK27. The idea being that it’s shot from the point of view of the very grumpy looking cat which seems to own every part of the house.

Unfortunately the video can’t be embedded here due to restrictions on Vimeo but well worth heading over to Dezeen to watch it in full.

Via Fraher Architects.

Pretty much spot on*.

By Louis Hellman.

*I do prefer to have people in my shots though.

Somehow I managed to come across this disk in the office earlier, promptly taking me right back to my first job in an Architects office in the summer of 1998. This was a summer job before I started my degree. Obviously the tech is fairly ancient but this used to be required to print work from the CAD package of the time – ClarisCAD which in itself was a fairly basic bit of software to a pen plotter. The pen plotter was quite literally a set of pens which looked like mini rotorings and came in different thicknesses. The software would then tell the plotter which pens to pick based on which lineweights you’d used in your drawings. Nine times out of ten it would be out of action due to the obvious flaws of using pens to create A1 drawings at high speed.

In those days all drawings would be printed on trace and then any copies would be made on a dyeline machine which used some pretty awful chemicals along with bright yellow light sensitive paper. The Architects always threatened me with making me clean it as a joke. All admin was carried out in reception by two amazing secretaries. No typing you own minutes and letters. And I also just remembered that there was tea and coffee served on a trolley at 9am and 2pm to all staff. Some things are due for a comeback I think.

Another set of images from our visit to Dungeness last weekend, this time of the weird and wonderful structures that exist there. Hopefully these are slightly less cliche than the others.

I deliberately avoided the two modern houses that have recently arrived designed by Simon Condor and NORD – I think they’re pretty well covered already and the originals are far more interesting to me.

I shot these all handheld with a 50mm ƒ1.8 and I might do a few prints of these soon if anyone is interested. A select few below but the full set can be seen on Flickr.