Maria Atik

Overview 

The Structure brief project consisted on portraying the architects vision of a chosen building by considering it’s shape, form, functionality and capturing the structure and details of their structure, the inside of it ( it allowed by COVID rules, etc.) By taking inspiration from contemporary architectural photographers and applying perspective correction afterwards in post-production, the final image should reflect and show the building by highlighting key details as well as unique features, showing detail of this. The building chosen as the subject for this project was Glasgow Gurdwara Guru Granth Sahib located on Albert Drive, Glasgow, UK.

The Brief

I do believe I have met the requirements for the brief as the structure I have selected shows beautiful architectural structure and beautiful Dom’s and creation as part of a location to praise entities like God’s, and beautifully enhanced to be peaceful. It also shows other culture that ‘we are not used to’ but represents a big part of Glasgow’s heritage and also this shows how welcoming Glasgow is as a city towards other cultures, ethnicities and religions. Shows diversity and this is a good example about it.

Also the structure itself it’s very representative of their religion and culture it’s based on which are the Gurdwara’s, where Sinkhs come together for congregational worship

The Reseach 

My research consisted of 10 photographers not purposely searched to cover every part of photography but just on the haunt of new photographers I didn’t knew, on a new area I'm covering.

All images are similar in the sense of style, being minimalistic architectural playing with the shadows brought by light and contrast created by this, in the details of the buildings and the light coming out of places: glass, windows, holes. Geometric and pleasant to look at, colour was purposely here too.

The Presentation

The final part/ process of the project consisted of getting the images together and show them or display them on a way that you felt pleased with and perhaps added more into your project. For mine I have used a classic Canvas, a white paper where I have decided to organise my images and play with the spaces and sizes of them, and the empty spaces to.

I would perhaps preferred to create individuals display of this, where I am showing the images individually perhaps cropped on a specific shape, with some text next to them or just for the please of the eye and attention to detail you can get when going bigger. And the finally showed a canvas at the end.

Final Thoughts

The main thing encountering Architectural photography it’s to keep your photographs and portraits of building to keep the perspective right, lines straight and aligned and flattening those curves.

As distortion comes with the lenses, this needs to be corrected afterwards and what might seem straight to our eyes at first and in line with the other bits, after are not.

This is the original image 

So I have done this in Photoshop by going into Edit > Perspective Warp

And here we fix the problem, we can observe in here how the right hand wall it’s straighten and therefore everything is corrected with it.

Here we can see another example:

A) before

B) after

I have also done some Chromatic aberration correction that we can observe by zooming like in here

We duplicate the layer and create a Gaussian Blurr into it and we change the Blending Mode into Colour.

Now this done and applied, the duplicated layer applies the removal of  chromatic aberration to the whole image and we want to void this in areas where there’s none, so we create a Mask and start painting white to reveal the parts that are not affected by it.

There’s another perspective correction here

A)

B)

This is something I’ve applied to most my photos like some basic editing I do to all of them starting in Lightroom, then more tweaked and ‘advanced’ in Photoshop like 

-Chromatic Aberration

-Perspective Correction

-And the elimination of distracting objects in the way in your photos

-High Pass

These are my final 15 photos from which I have chosen 6 from this to show as my final project Structure photo project.

From this 6 final photos I have created my Canvas.

These are my selected final 6 chosen, with the cross X and then edited and colour graded respectively.

I have finally chose 6 final images, one of them being the main building showing the whole building with a wide shot, then we can see the Dom, on a main focus shot and a close up of it as well.

We can see this from the side too, as well a wide -shot of the surrounding of the Gurdwarda and the side wall that has, one of my favourites.

A viewpoint from the side showing the main Dom and a smaller one, plus showing the Flag which is really symbolic in here.

High Speed Flash-

High Speed Flash- Water droplets

Unseen / simple time-lapse video

Cross polarisation

Macro Greater than Life Size

High Speed Flash

For my shot I am doing two locations

1. Glasgow Gurdwara 

Which is really to access as it is really close to my flat, from walking distance. It its not busy at all, most of the times and it has a free space for parking, I'm guessing, that allows me to work.

I have tried calling to ask permission to take photos, as I don't want to go in just like that, but no answer.

Location is great too for lightning, as there is always the sun lightning from the sides, making it visible and good for getting detail. And in the evenings, now in Spring/Summer times it is really good for sunset sky’s and reflections in the building.

2.Secc Car Park 7 

My second option, which is actually my first.

By this I mean that is the building I want to be basing my project on, but for this I need to plan a couple of hours showing as the travel time will be longer as it is not as close as the Durgwara.

But I am really excited to do this, as it is one architecture I admire and I always end up staring at every time I see it.

It’s funny it’s a car park too, makes it beautiful too, as we tend to reserve good architecture for buildings of purpose like concert halls, museums, etc.

I won't be needing a permit for this spot, as it is a car park.

For equipment I will be using both Tripod and my camera, as well as a wide angle lens, from 17-50mm and a fish eye lens, as well as a close up one, if I do have or borrow from college.

Wont be using artificial lights or reflectors, no point for this.

Find 10 examples of Architectural photography from diverse sources which explore varied aspects of a building, look for wide shots, detail shots, abstract shots, human interaction. Record your comments and thoughts on the skills displayed, the quality of light and how the photographer has enhanced the Architects vision.

1.     Ansel Adam-

This is a close up of the building, getting more intimate. I like the open door framing the back door, and the two crosses over lapping each other and scenarios. I think this is something that the photographer liked, as the approach is not very meticulous either. I love, very natural.

2.     David Goldblatt

This is more a generic shot, the photographer is not showing the whole building either not a close-up either. But still it is interesting as you get to see the different buildings overlapping.

3.     Lucien Herve

This is a very interesting one, a frame part of one of the building’s side, playing with loads of contrast and the person’s figure to create more shadow and textures and shapes. Shape is very important here, very dark too, seems mysterious. An abstract shot.

4.     Stephen Shore

I love this shot. The photographer wanted to make a statement with this, simple and clear. Here it is and that's what we see. This is a wide-shot showing the whole architecture. 

5.     Lewis Baltz

This shot it a wide angle one, but getting more into a bit of detail. This is a detail shot. Shapes and contrast are very strong here as that’s what the building shows.

6.     Andreas Gursky

This is a very close-up shot of a very high and tall building that probably are flats in a big city, this can easily be London. I found this always very interesting and admire them, as the colours next to the other, and the little scenes in every window has so much to observe and so much captures in one scene.

7.     Thomas Struth

This is a wide angle shot showing the whole building plus the scene surrounding it like the people in the scene at that moment, and the businesses next to them. This is a more inclusive shot and also less formal, so more casual.

8.     Berenice Abbott

Interior shot. The play with the lights and the time of day, to get that though the glasses effect was very well played. This also includes the figurines of the people at the time, and this is very well important in here. As contrast, from the light you get the shadows of the people and this is very smart.

9.     Edumund Sumner

This is a close up, a detail of an architectural space. In this case its an open hole which creates a window, this probably is from a warm based location to be doing that and the style. The red light on the inside and the natural elements and colours from the outside contrast them, making it cozy. It also suggests the vision of the photographer standing there watching through it, like we will probably do if we visited there.

10.  Tekla Evelina Severin

Stop Motion Evaluation

For this project we had to create a Stop Motion video in which consists in a creation of a video made by photos. It is an animated filmmaking technique also, in which objects or figurines are photographed and then turned into a video.

Ours was specifically to be made with food, so it was very narrowed and I think that is good, as we never explored this, or at least I didn’t, it’s simple to keep it easy and also get a hold and your head wrapped around the video editing programs.

I have used Adobe Pro which I think was very complicated, but it resembled Photoshop but for videos, which is good. Because it seems very complicated at first, but mostly because I have never used this program before so everything was new for me.

But like Photoshop, I think is it so wide in variety that the more you get to know the program you realise how much you’ve got at the palm of your hands.

What I have found hard about this was some technical problems, as I was having problem with my Laptop’s disk and for editing became really hard and it actually took me time to get the laptop clean and also with the Hard Drive, as this was almost full as well due to having unnecessary very RAW files.

Anyways, I found this very fun with the result and I would like to get to know more the program and see what it’s got to offer.

I am also a bit disappointed to not have done the video fully as I wanted, because I wanted to add some sound and a Text at the end saying ‘The End -  A Breakfast Story ‘ with very classical lyrics black & white Disney did.

But I tried getting into text, and it seemed too complicated and time consuming as I didn’t had any idea.

After shooting my images, I opened them into Lightroom like usual and edited one of them, once happy with the results I had batch edited them all the same way with the same settings which saves you loads of time and work, and if all images are shot under the same conditions the results will be very similar to not say almost identical. 

Then I downloaded Adobe Pro for creating my stop motion video. This was a bit more complicated to be fair, I had no idea how to work this and everything was and still new to me.

So had loads of help from Youtube videos which saved my life. I ended up finding how to create a Stop motion, as this final video comes from the results of photos, while the normal settings were from direct videos to make a longer video. If that makes sense.

This is the before and after editing.

And this is how to batch edit in Lightroom:

Press Command + option on Mac on the image you’ve edited already and want the rest of the photos to be edited with those settings

Command + option clicking on the image you want to copy the settings from > Develop Settings > Copy Settings 

And then select all the photos you want to edit, pressing Command to select all of these and then same again 

Command + Option while selecting your batch of photos and > Develop Settings > Paste Settings 

My idea for this video was something that was achievable and still looked funny and nice.

I always tend to get out of my ways when it comes to idea, like buying specific objects for that project but I just thought, something I do daily and it needs to be based on food, what else than why I have for breakfast sometimes?

So I decided to shoot my bowl of vegan vanilla yoghurt, while chopping the banana and make it look like they getting into the bowl in a wiggly movement and then added the granola.

On the end, I made the banana peal go away as well on a funny way, think this was very fun to do.

As a background I kept it simple, a white paper of A3 sheet where I could handle my food and placed on the floor, for an easy shooting from above.

And for production equipment I had my camera, studio lights, just one big soft box did the job and my tripod to keep it simple.

I connected my camera via Wi-Fi to my phone’s app from Canon so I could shoot from the phone, without touching the camera itself and voiding shake. But somehow wasn't working.