Urban views

In a city where there are either no fields, or the hills inherent for a countryside, you will find a new variety of plots which can become perfect basis of other type of a landscape photo. Maybe it may sound better to name it "city view" or "urban landscape". The plot is the other buh many basic topics are the same. Photographing random buildings row on the street does not have more sense than taking pictures of confluent landscape of fields and hills. Picture has to contain a sense center and something dispatching scale and depth.


Unlike the panoramic approach offered for more traditional landscape works, in urban scenes details are often interesting. Try to find harmony in an arrangement of buildings bordering on to each other or pay attention to an ornament formed by embrasures in a wall. Experiment with shooting angles, inclining the chamber to give a plot an impressionistic aspect. Use possibilities of various focusing to gate out such details like door rings or fragments of ornaments on ancient buildings. Look narrowly at illuminated signs of owls-belt of streets which form a certain pattern, a hum for which the sky or a suitable building serves. Look for reflexions of one building in glass show-windows or windows of other building or reflexion of other installation any absolutely, e.g. a tree or the pond which has formed a single whole with a building, in which they were reflected. Blur is also useful reception for the photographer shooting urban landscapes, which can use the big stand-up to reinforce impression of brisk traffic on the street.

Very often, having changed a shooting point, the photographer can see the urban plot   he was interested in absolutely differently. For example, the building on the urban suburb, bounding on overgrown waste ground, will look in a picture perfect differently depending on from what party it is photographed. At shooting from city side it will seem an overgrown tall weeds, and shooting from an opposite side will seem the integral element of a business part of a city.

Light plays especially important role at photographing of street scenes and architectures, unequally affecting on various surfaces of buildings. Reflexion of the sun from glass under different angles can create absolutely various effects; the flat concrete surface is the most favourable for photographing at bright solar illumination when on it dense shades are kuck; roughnesses of a masonry work well deposit at illumination slantwise an incident light. Accurate drawing of metal lattices and pales is very effective in photos with contre illumination which is gating out a silhouette with light lines along the edges. The diffused light is better, than lateral illumination, allows to reveal ornaments on buildings, and lateral illumination in turn reinforces contrast between the contiguous parties of a building.

To change transfer of the image of an urban landscape, it is possible applying various objectives. Long focal-length lenses narrow a prospect, and with their help it is possible to gain a picture of buildings closed above with each other. Wide-angle lenses, on the contrary, open perspek-tivu. At shooting of such plots often it is necessary to face problem of a verticals convergence. This problem can be solved in two ways: either to correct a convergence, or to use it. For correction it is necessary to move separate parts of a camera or to use an objective correcting perspectiv distortions. First can be carried out by means of stage cameras and lies in displacement of the panel of an objective upwards in such a manner that it remains to a parallel plane of a film, but two centres do not place any more on one horizontal line. As a result the overhead parts of a photographed building which otherwise would fall out of a shot, will be located in it, not demanding a camera inclination. Hence, also twirl-kali will not converge. The objectives correcting perspectiv distortions are based on a similar principle also. For middle-format and the 35-mm cameras some models of such objectives are released. Adjusting adaptations on an objective allow shifting it in parallel a film plane. More details on question of movings (motions) in a camera is observed in the chapter describing special techniques of shooting. Without these motions "scoring" the camera upwards you always gain converging vertical lines. Whenever possible to get rid of this effect, try to choose a shooting point as far as possible further from a photographed building or to remove it from a rule when you are above its base, for example from a window of a building standing opposite. If you can occupy such rule for shooting to be at the level matching approximately to half altitude of removed installation, and thus photograph an objective with a focal length not more shortly, than a standart kind of objectives in such situation you are in condition to control a convergence of verticals. If condition of make you photograph a building at a short distance and you cannot rise above ground level you should use the following reception.

Shoot this building with wide-angle lens, but direct an objective downwards, to land and to the building basis so that the building is filling only the overhead half of shot. Later, at work in laboratory, tape only a matching part of a negative. If you shoot on a reversal film it is necessary to make a mask for a slide or to make a copy from its overhead half.

The convergence of verticals can be used and as a graphic means. If your purpose is that, than whenever possible make photos with wide-angle objective. The less is focal length, the more noticeable effect of a convergence you'll get.