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 Keeping a Weather Eye
It's been an intriguing and, I hope, an enlightening journey so far, but having reached this stage I felt this was a good time to get back to exploring one of the cornerstones of good image making - light quality. Without a solid grasp of this subject as the basis for your photography, everything else is almost academic. So let's return to some fundamentals of light and lighting before we venture any further down this architectural exploration. One of the benefits of living in the UK is the wide range of weather types possible - often during the same day! We may complain about the inconsistency of the weather and the lack of constant sunshine, but it does lead to a plethora of different lighting conditions. It is this vagary of cloud and sunlight that ensures a moving tapestry of form and shadow over our buildings, painting them with different effects and creating almost a new set each time you take a look at your subject. This can have a dramatic effect on how buildings and structures appear, both to the eye and for recording onto film or silicone. For example, I was lucky when travelling up through North Yorkshire very early one morning to find Richmond Castle wreathed in the most beautiful mists as dawn broke. With light clouds in the sky and foreground tress giving contrast and depth to the scene, I was well pleased with the result. Imagine, though, if the day had dawned a drab grey as it often does in Western Europe. The same scene would have looked hardly photogenic, and my shutter release would not have been clicking merrily away, I'm pretty sure. So from this one example we can deduce that light quality is clearly of great significance. Though the weather was quite different for the shot of
the housing estate - a crisp, clear winter morning with cloudless skies
- this again illustrates the point about taking advantage of conditions.
The low angle of the sun and long shadows give great texture to the scene,
while the frost of the distant roofs and foreground grass is enough to
bring out the goosepimples in anyone. A half hour later and there would
have been nothing to shoot from the same viewpoint.
There are also occasions on which strong contrasty lighting would be a hindrance. When capturing delicate architectural details and colours as in these scenes from London buildings, soft diffused light delivered by cloudy skies is exactly what you pray for. If you were to take the same pictures in strong sunlight, the harshness and extra shadows would ruin the subtlety and form that is easily apparent, and lead to an over fussy image in each case. Always look to take pictures where the light quality enhances what you are trying to achieve, rather than working against your objectives. When producing pictures for a travel guide, I used the diffused daylight of a cloudy day to fall gently through the leaded window and give lovely form to this interior scene. Hard sunlight pouring through the same aperture would have delivered a far harsher and less subtle picture. Some of the best lighting conditions occur at dawn and
dusk, which can often be witnessed in the colder months but need serious
dedication to capture during summer. I'd been shooting a Bedfordshire
garden for a whole day for a magazine article, and though my eyes were
beginning to turn square from the constant peering through the viewfinder,
I still had the energy to utilise the setting sun to lend drama to this
windmill scene. A wide lens from a low viewpoint and placing the sun right
in one of the blades meant that I knew I'd grabbed a great silhouette.
Instead of looking into the late sunlight at Whitby, I let it illuminate the harbour and housing from right behind me. As you can see the quality of light is quite different, with far less contrast although the scene is very brightly lit. This is basically a shot about reflections - off the calm water and off the windows of all the houses ascending the hill beyond. On a breezier cloudier day, the water would have been ruffled and there would have been no sunshine to reflect, so quite simply there wouldn't have been a shot either. The motto is take your chances and be aware of light direction, as it can be manipulated to your advantage.
The two shots of the church also reveal the effects of pointing your camera into or with the light. Shoot with the sunlight behind you or to one side and there's a good chance on a sunny day you'll obtain a lovely blue sky to set off your subject. For the second shot I walked to the far side of the church and shot towards the sunlight. Contrast has leapt, there's a stronger sense of shadow and form on the building, and the tree shadows seem suddenly elongated. The other main factor is that the sky has turned paler, with just a hint of blue towards the left side. When a storm is brewing and most sane people are heading for home or some form of shelter, that's often the time I grab my outfit bag and head off looking for pictures. Roaming around the edges of Cambridgeshire, I waited for the storm to pass and was then lucky as horizontal shafts of sunlight beamed onto Wisbech, transforming the town centre. These amazing conditions lasted just moments, but the more effort you put in, the luckier you seem to get with the weather. Once the sun has set, don't forget a sturdy tripod means that there's plenty more time to keep taking pictures. This shot of a Birmingham pub has great atmosphere due to the warm colour of the artificial lighting compared to the cold blue tones of the sky. An exposure of about 40 seconds also added movement to the scene, with the branches and scudding clouds clearly shifting during the shutter opening.
It is how the weather and light behaves that gives us so many chances of taking exquisite pictures of our favourite buildings. Learn to read the light, how it changes and how it affects the planes and contours of a building, and you'll go a long way to being an effective architectural photographer.
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