Perspective is everything.
These are the golden Towers of Luxembourg. They belong to the European Court of Justice and currently they are a building a third one. There is a lot of love and hate whether they are beautiful or just the ugliest thing on the Kirchberg in Luxembourg. Things that polarise bring always good publicity, so I decided to use this image for my portfolio.
The golden towers are the tallest office buildings in Luxembourg with a height of 103m which is a good topic to talk about perspective for a minute. In architectural photography I talked already about tilt-shift lenses and how they can preserve the correct perspective by avoiding distortion. Photography on the other hand is not just about capturing realistic environments, it’s a form of art. Like every art photography has a lot of room to play with perspective, both figuratively and literally.
RAW-images are rare!
Otherwise, we would retouch images, colour grading them and make compositions. I would say in the digital age, RAW-images are very rare, even a smartphone puts a filter on pictures or adds at least sharpening and colour grade.
Back to the perspective though.
When it comes to perspective people often get picky if something looks odd or distorted. You can play with it hugely by using lenses with different focal lengths or by placing the camera in odd positions.
That weird „eye “ of a photographer
When people talk about the eye of a photographer, it’s mainly about the camera position, which differentiates often an amateur from a professional. Everybody who starts with photography tends to take pictures from eye level. They won’t move around get low or high or tilt the camera up.
Like in this example, tall buildings look taller when the camera is tilted upwards. The distortion of the lens actually helps now to emphasize the size of the building. With a skyscraper it’s quite obvious that you look up, because you do the same without a camera. But it works as well with every kind of architecture, tall or small. I can only recommend to look up more often, when you are walking, especially when you like architecture. Suddenly you get a completely different perspective you might use for your next image.
– Dominik Berg –
