
McEwan Hall, Edinburgh
I have no favourite type of line – for me, the curve is as exciting as the straight line, as long it’s in harmony with everything else in the frame. Curves give a sense of movement and add colour and calmness to a composition, verticals provide drama and height, horizontals help compose proportion and diagonals join an image together, providing visual depth to the picture. Add the right light into the mix and the coupling can be consolidated into a memorable image in its own right, detached from the subject itself.
Lines are everywhere, there is no getting away from them but they don’t necessarily immediately please – in architectural photography, it’s a case of exploring the best angles, heights and perspectives that will provide the best shot to embody the subject. I think about the building, landscape or the interior and decide what it conveys such as strength, softness, dynamism etc and decide how I will best represent this in an image with the lines I can see through the camera. When converting a 3 dimensional space to a 2 dimensional image the lines can look very different.
The time of day and time of year is all important for providing the right light in the relationship and in architectural photography that is of course heavily influenced by my nemesis: the weather. It’s not always possible for a commercial architectural photographer to chose when to photograph a building but I always try to utilise light as part of the structure. Photographing just as dusk falls or when the sun is rising are often my favourite times of the day for composing images.