Architectural Photography: Professional Techniques for Shooting Interior and Exterior Spaces

Having enjoyed Norman McGrath's earlier book, "Photographing Buildings Inside and Out", about two decades ago and having lived and worked in several of the buildings that appear in his images, I looked forward to his new book, "Architectural Photography - Professional Techniques for Shooting Interior and Exterior Spaces". Now that I have read it, I am somewhat disappointed. It's not a bad book, mind you, but it's not great either. While the field of Architectural Photography is exacting, detail-oriented and deliberate, his treatment here is somehow vague, apparently aimed neither at beginners nor at experienced photographers. This book is also lacking in useful updates on the changes that digital imaging has made to the field.In his latest book, Norman McGrath presents many of his images made over the decades of his experience in the field, as well as some images by other photographers. Most images are presented fairly large, as they should be, and are well-printed. They are extensively captioned but there isn't very much other text. Thankfully, McGrath dives directly into the topic at hand and spares us irrelevant filler on the history of photography, "this is an f-stop", etc. as so many other authors do.The Chapter Headings are:- The Profession of Architectural Photography- Selecting Equipment- Interior Photography- Photographing Outdoors- Landscapes and Large Structures- Challenging Situations- Photographic Workshops and Other SourcesThe author covers specific sub-topics like: Photographic Style, Shooting Tethered vs Untethered, Season, Staging an Outdoor Shoot, and Dusk: The Magic Hour, offering from as little as two paragraphs to 2-3 pages of text on each.His equipment recommendations boil down to: 'get a view camera or else use a full-frame digital with a Perspective Control / Tilt Shift lens'. There are no images of his equipment in use; beginners could have benefited from seeing a small image of a View Camera or a center-weighted graduated filter, items they might not otherwise have encountered before.The book offers precious little advice on lighting interiors and ignores the placement of additional lights and matching the intent of the architect or interior decorator.This book is particularly weak on digital imaging. Perhaps in his practice theauthor leaves the computer processing to his assistants and is less familiar with it, but digital imaging has dramatically changed the way architectural photographers plan and perform their work. Saying little on High Dynamic Range, the author refers us to Michael Freeman's book on HDR, also published by Amphoto. (That book is literally, not virtually, unreadable with horrid editing and typesetting and hopelessly tiny images. Amphoto used to produce such great books on Photography; what's going on over there now?)On page 175, the author becomes uncharacteristically specific, telling us that in processing one image, a brush size of 82 pixels was used with a hardness of 13 percent. Experienced Photoshop users will know that these numbers depend entirely on circumstances and personal technique and are otherwise insignificant. Newbies will be confused and wonder what's so magical about them. Little hard information is offered on post-processing elsewhere in the book.There is also hardly any useful information on stitching. Beginners might have appreciated suggestions like maintaining a preset manual focus and manual white balance for all un-stitched component sections but this doesn't appear in the book. There is also no hint of the possibility of stitching a larger wide-angle view with a narrow-angle lens in two dimensions instead of the obvious 1-D panorama. Surprisingly, there is also no real discussion of perspective, an essential aspect of architectural work.(For a very useful and architecture-specific treatment of Perspective, Dynamic Range, and managing color temperature with mixed lighting, see chapters 7 and 12 of Katrin Eismann's excellent  Photoshop Masking & Compositing . The material in this and her  Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition)  are essential knowledge for any digital imaging professional. Highly recommended.)One final note: Among the images by other photographers, McGrath presents two images on pages 36-37 by an expatriate Israeli photographer. One shows a panoramic image of jumbled concrete; the other is an arty photo of, well, of nothing in particular. The relevance of these images to architectural photography still eludes me. The author doesn't describe the second image at all but writes about the first :"The entire complex has been created by the Israeli government for target practice. What an indictment!" (emphasis in the original text). The author is incorrect. The photo depicts an Urban Warfare Training Center in southern Israel that was largely built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Both Israeli and U.S. forces train there in hostage rescue and anti-terrorism tactics with an emphasis on saving innocent lives. It was most certainly not made for target practice and shouldn't be an indictment of anything. While such images with misleading descriptions might be popular among the over-monied-black-t-shirt-arty-farty-anti-war-at-all-costs-crowd, they represent political propaganda, not reality. I have corresponded with the author about this; both the author and the photographer are residents of post-9/11 NYC and might have been more realistic.Overall, this book is a reasonably-priced and worthwhile addition to a library on photography. While it suffers from some unfortunate editing mishaps, it is otherwise fairly well-made with many architectural images. However, it fails to deliver on the promises of the subtitle and the marketing fluff. If you've shot a few properties, you will probably have discovered on your own most of the "professional techniques" that the book promises and won't find much new here. It's a pity - the book could have been so much more.

Norman McGrath's previous book "Photographing Buildings Inside and Out" was a classic in it's time. This new version is still a significant publication. However, it can best be summarised as "Norman's transitition to digital with a little help from his friends".The layout is somewhat confused compared with the earlier book, with the section on equipment not coming in until page 63 and even then being mixed up with HDR and shooting for websites. However, at least he scopes the digital options and is not a diehard who still insists that professional architectural photography must be done on 5" x 4" large format. His chapters on interior and exterior photography have many useful tips for the working professional.However, when it comes to the nitty gritty of new technology, the coverage is mostly quite thin and relies on reference to other texts for the practical detail. In some ways this is good as the last thing a book on architectural photography should be is just another photo editing software primer. However, there are a few glaring omissions. HDR is not explained in any detail, with the reader instead enthusiastically referred to another text, one that is arguably not the best or most popular on the subject. Correcting converging verticals using photo editing software is mentioned but even simple instruction on the use of the transform-perspective and free-transform tools in Photoshop is not included. The author still obviously uses strobes quite significantly in his work, despite the advent of HDR, but there is little if any real guidance in their use. Much of what he has to say is contained in the captions and text attached to separate examples of his work. While most of the examples are excellent and inspiring, this approach is at the expense of continuity in the overall book and not much help when you are looking for help on a particular topic.Overall, the book is still a worthwhile reference for the serious architectural photographer, if for nothing else because it demolishes the mantra that all professional architectural photography must be done on large format equipment, even though the majority of it is never published much bigger than A4. The photographs are excellent but not superior to those in his earlier book, but then fine photography never was and probably never will be solely governed by technology

I am an experienced portrait and landscape photographer and was starting to do interior and architecture photography. Since this book was titled "Professional Technique for Shooting Interior and Exterior Spaces" I bought it hoping to learn basics (ex leveling camera for straight lines, interior lighting, rise/fall, going with wider or narrower lenses, distributing space in the frame etc).Sad to say I didn't learn much because this book is more organized as a collection of wonderful images with complementary text instead of the other way around. In each chapter the author starts with a bit of general text and quickly moves into showcasing pictures and explaining how they were shot. Most pictures come with plenty of details. In fact that's where I found few useful techniques, buried in the small text.One such technique I stumbled into for example is that including more floor in the frame gives a sense of greater space in interior shots. That is the kind of technique I was looking forward to learning, but sadly this book doesn't offer much.Overall, the book is easy to read and full of interesting pictures, but comes short on the main topic, technique. If you are looking for something about photography to read for entertainment this book might be for you. Otherwise if you aim to get a solid understanding of architectural photography consider Architectural Photography: Composition, Capture, and Digital Image Processing by Adrian Schulz.

Nice book with some interesting thoughts from this veteran photographer. The technical advice is strictly for the professional or those with a lot of spare cash- Arca Swiss view cameras and Rodenstock lenses are his main tools and anything less than a full frame DSLR is considered unsuitable. The bits on photoshop are, by contrast, pretty superficial and rather amateurish - converging verticals corrected but other distortion not considered.Some nice images though and good examples of other photographers' work. The only let down is the rather poor quality paper and pretty awful printing particularly the image on page 131 of my copy which is misaligned down the middle. It is only a paperback and fairly cheap but even so for a photographer who sets so much store by high quality work something of a disappointment.The graphic design is also a little dated, but I'm being picky now. For the money not a bad book at all.

A bit dated in today's fast moving technological change in photography, needs a new edition.

Arrived promptly and in good condition. It's the best Architecture photography book that I have found so far... but, be warned, the author wrote the book at the start of digital... things have moved on since then and much of the technical advice is outdated. But still a good book with good advice.

excellent book, upgrade me a lot, strongly recommand

Great book and pictures. Learn a lot from it. The pictures were outstanding and I loke the way the book was presented to the readers.