Anyone who spends a lifetime pursuing a creative profession will experience an evolution in personal taste and aesthetics as they progress throughout their career. This change will be influenced partially by market trends and partially by the creator’s personal journey with himself. As we age, our tastes become more specialized and refined. I mean hell, I remember as a broke college student when Chili’s or California Pizza Kitchen was considered worth getting excited about. Nowadays most of the food I cook at home is significantly better than what I can expect at most restaurants. This gives me a greater appreciation for the fantastic meals I have when dining out. And I can literally taste the “artificialness” of lower quality restaurants.
If your work looks the same as it did five years ago, you are sabotaging yourself and stunting your growth.
When I was first getting “good” at photography, I stumbled over a common trap set by the excitement of learning new techniques. I wanted my photos to be “extra as F***.” I thought that just because I could, therefore I should. This resulted in extremely contrasty, busy images full of elements with no thought or real intention. I did this with my exposure blends for landscapes and cities, the overuse of flash, and padded my images with pointless sky replacements and the generic light trails that everyone does when they first discover how to drag the shutter. It was the photographic equivalent of a Golden Corral where you’re encouraged to stack your plate with whatever random garbage passes for food at the buffet line.
Now don’t get me wrong, I still like some of those old photos, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using any of the elements I described above or any that I fail to mention as long as they’re done with intention and serve the theme and purpose of your image. Car streaks can certainly go a long way if you want to specifically convey the chaos and movement of a busy, urban intersection, or if the red colors of brake lights provide a nice contrast to an overwhelmingly blue and otherwise empty twilight scene, but they don’t belong in every night time photo you ever take just because you know how to take a long exposure. Another example would be exposure blending and HDR. Just because you know how to blend images to preserve maximum detail in the shadows and highlights doesn’t mean every image you take should be evenly exposed. It’s ok for the image to fluctuate with areas that are darker and brighter.
Architectural Photography can be hard to find success in. And in reflective moments of twilight and whiskey, those who do succeed will honestly admit to being broken one or two times along the way, present company included. But as you gain experience, you’ll hopefully be taking notes on the kind of aesthetics that appeal to different audiences and either adapting to the taste of those audiences or curating an audience for your personal style.
My architectural clients value a different look than when I used to shoot for real estate agents who demanded everything to be super wide with lots of contrast and saturation (yuck) to show off the “big dick” living room to whatever investor looking to hide his money they had lined up. By contrast, my architectural clients have a more refined, “less is more” perspective. They don’t care how “poppy” your flash blends are and will be appalled if you’ve lost the mood of their ambient light or completely flattened the geometry of the architecture in the process. Undisciplined use of flash can draw too much attention to itself and away from the subject.
I also have commercial and hospitality clients who are a mix of both. They value polished perfection and are more than ok with distorting reality as long as I can convince people that it looks real. They love it when I nuke a room with flash, but they would hate results that made the technique obvious.
I am not saying that you need to compromise your style to please everyone. Hell, I fully accept that some clients will never hire me because they might find my style to be a bit too “perfect and polished” even when I am trying my best to be conservative about it. You can’t, and shouldn’t try to please everyone.
But you do need to be aware of why you’re doing something.
You need to learn what elements of your photographs resonate with who and why that is so. In doing so, you’ll learn to honestly critique your own work without bias and accurately determine if the decisions you make achieve the results you’re hoping for. You might also discover that aesthetic elements you once held in high regard might seem a bit crude or dated now and that some never go out of style. You will stay relevant.
You’ll also be a much better professional for it because you will be able to consciously articulate these decisions with your client in a way that makes you seem reassuring and in control, instead of some kid on Instagram shouting “check out these sick ‘tones’ on my bangers brah.” They will be more confident in their decision to let you take the reins.
A Tale of Two Architectural Photos:
With that said, I am going to break down why the second image of The East Hotel at Brickell City Centre works so much better than the first one I took four years ago.
At first glance, the original photo looks very “cool.” You’ve got an epic sky with dramatic clouds and lots of dynamic streaks of cars in the foreground framing the building. I personally love the orange reflections on the glass towards the top left edge of the building. However, I feel that anyone with a distinguished eye can instantly, and correctly conclude that the subject is lost in all the chaos. In fact, there’s no anchor point to direct the audience as to what, exactly the subject is. As a “badass” photo of downtown Miami, I think it works very well. It was certainly very popular on Instagram and got lots of likes, and if your goal is to just build an audience from “cool” photography, then the photo serves you well. I would consider it a successful photograph. Youtubers and influencers would be served well with this type of picture as it draws a lot of attention to itself and that’s what their content needs to do.
But as an architectural photograph, it is a colossal failure, and I can see why the architects didn’t feel compelled to respond to an offer when I reached out to them to license the image. It fails to properly frame the subject and direct the eye to the architecture. The building is backlit as it was taken back in my “everything needs to have a badass, dramatic sky” days, which was really more of an excuse to be lazy and not wake up early. There is no contrast or depth to the shape of the building. If you’re going to backlight a building, it should either be a silhouette to accentuate its shape or have a compelling, thoughtful lighting design, where the scene is exposed to draw the eye to them, and those lights should be on.
The car trails are a further distraction as they turn the foreground into a space battle between the Empire and the Jedi. They add nothing except themselves. Trails of light can add some spice to a scene featuring architecture with design elements that cater to cars and traffic, but here it just looks like the traffic jam from hell. I’ve evolved my long exposures since them. I currently refrain from dragging the shutter too long because I prefer the cars to look like automobiles in motion rather than laser beams. Of course, exceptions do apply. As the brightest parts of the image, they’re also where your eye instinctively goes first. Another point of failure.
The second photo makes no mystery of what the subject is. It clearly wants your eyes directed at the center of the frame looking at the East Hotel as that is where the brightest part of the image is. There are quite a number of intentional techniques I used in crafting this image, but the purpose is the name of the game here. I shot this image first thing in the morning just as the sun was starting to peek over the horizon, which gave a subtle gradient of colorful reflections at the base of the glass facade. It’s also the most saturated part of the scene. The direct, morning light also provides natural contours of light and shadow on the building, which is how you create depth and properly sculpt the geometry of a structure in an architectural photograph.
There is a sky replacement. I didn’t like the natural sky. But it’s desaturated and not so busy. It doesn’t command too much attention and accurately represents a typical, cloudy morning in Miami.
I purposefully used frames from an earlier period of the morning before the sun was up to keep the surrounding buildings a bit more underexposed as I did not want my audience’s eyes to focus on irrelevant structures. However, I still wanted to accurately portray the subject within the context of its environment. This also provides a more natural vignette than just dragging your exposure down and feathering an oval mask in Photoshop.
The foreground is distinctly barren, a stark contrast to the first image. Instead of a cluster of cars, there is a single cyclist delicately lit by the peeking sun. The shadows on the floor offer insight into the directionality of the light. The cyclist adds a dash of humanity and movement while also providing a sense of scale that accurately demonstrates the height of the building. No description needed. I did shoot some frames featuring cars on Brickell Avenue to give myself the option but intentionally chose to omit them as I wanted a more sophisticated and cleaner platform with which to frame my subject. I feel like this provides a more optimistic and calming scene for the viewer. This is something to be admired, not a landmark of congestion. Clusters of cars offer a perception of smog and grime, stress, and anxiety. They might be appropriate for certain images, perhaps a photo essay that documents the existential threat modern spaces can inflict on those with longer commutes, but as a general rule, they are unsavory. Someone might envy the cyclist, but nobody wants to be in Brickell rush hour.
The second photograph appeals more to someone who would have poured his heart and soul into designing the building whereas the first uses the building as merely a prop for a scene. I don’t think either is wrong, but the second is better suited to attract the clients I want and the direction I want my career to go. And it so happens to also jive with my current aesthetic preferences. From an interior design perspective, the second photo would make a much better print to hang on a wall as it won’t hog all the attention in the room. As a general rule, prints work best when they’re more minimalistic and complement the other aspects of the design such as the furniture or the color of the walls. This is something I can personally attest to as I do in fact have the first photo hanging in my living room on a metallic print, and for some time have desired to change it.
It’s not my intention to stifle anyone’s creativity but rather to show you how to curate your own personal taste by taking a long, hard critical look at your own work. There are no hard and fast rules, and even where they exist, in art and in life (sometimes), they are made to be broken. With practice, you’ll learn why a photograph works, how that applies to someone’s marketing problems, and why they should be willing to pay for it.
I feel I did a much more thoughtful job of incorporating moving elements in this shot of Paramount at Miami World Center as they present a more subtle and grounded interpretation of the scene. Reducing the amount of time I dragged the shutter also allowed the cars to be identifiable as cars instead of looking like lightsabers shooting through the scene. The Red Colors of the break lights also provide a harmonizing contrast of color with the predominant shades of blue in the sky.
This photo offers a more appropriate, and again, intentional use of the longer streaks of light we tend to associate with long exposures. In this case, felt that having the cars be identifiable as cars would sap the momentum. They would have looked like they were stuck in traffic. I wanted the movement to create a natural leading line to the city beyond.