I'm a thirty-something expat Brit living in Tokyo. An engineer with a Japanese company, I use photography as a creative outlet, to relax and for exercise.
When I arrived in Japan in 1996, I photographed everything in sight, burning film by the bucketload. As I practised, the duff shots got fewer and the “keepers” got better. I found I preferred “considered” to spontaneous photography, and started specialising in architecture.
Like many British “techies” my age, I grew up with 8-bit computers and learned to program assembler and machine code. Perhaps as a result, I adopt a very roll-your-own (albeit perhaps masochistic) approach to web site creation — this site was made with hand-crafted HTML edited using a ‘vi’ clone text editor or generated using a hand-rolled perl script.
A question I'm sometimes asked is “do you use a digital camera?” The answer is, “For general photography, yes. For architecture, no.”
Digital capture technology has been steadily improving. While just 10 years ago the image quality was distressingly poor and the cost of the equipment astronomical, nowadays the image quality attainable with affordable equipment is on a par with 35mm film, and the conveniences often outweigh the lower quality via-á-vis medium format film.
However, for much architectural photography, there are two essentials which are still not addressable with digital capture without spending shedloads of money: (1) wide angle lenses and (2) the ability to correct for converging verticals (the ‘keystoning’ effect you get when you point a camera up at a building).
Affordable digital SLR cameras often have a sensor that is smaller than a 35mm film frame, and so only capture the middle bit of the view of a lens designed for 35mm cameras. As a result, wide angle lenses are no longer so wide angle (the so-called ‘focal length multiplier’ effect) — my 20mm lens captures only the same angle of view as a 35mm lens when mounted on my DSLR. A solution is to use a camera with a ‘full-frame’ sensor the same size as a 35mm film frame, but these beasts are somewhat expensive (though the Canon EOS5D is getting close to affordable). Another solution would be to use a super-wide angle lens designed specifically for smaller sensor digital cameras. However, these are not usable with 35mm cameras and might suffer from image distortion and abberations, a big no-no with architecture.
Converging verticals are avoided by keeping the camera back strictly vertical (I use a spirit level to make sure!). However, this typically results in unsatisfactory framing since the top of a building is then usually cut off when photographing from ground level. Architectural photographers usually employ a view camera or a perspective control ‘shift’ lens, where the lens can be shifted up or down with respect to the film to bring the top of the building back into shot. Unfortunately, I do not own a shift lens for my 35mm system, and even if I did the focal length multiplier effect on my DSLR would render it less than useful. While my view camera is stunningly inconvenient to use, and the field of view of my medium format shift lens less than stellar, the image quality from either still stomps a DSLR image into the ground, so spending money to address the problem when using digital would not be worth the cost.
© 2000–2007 Mark A. Brown. All rights reserved.