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| © Lara Swimmer, www.swimmerphoto.com |
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Experience Music Project and other sites, Seattle, WA With Pike Place Market, the Space Needle, and more museums, music venues and coffee houses than you can count, Seattle is a sure bet for a memorable vacation. But to go beyond the usual tourist shots and capture stunning images of sloping glass and steel with dramatic angles and perspectives, focus on the city's contemporary architecture.
The Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project (EMP) is 140,000 square feet of multicolored, bending metal on the outside, with an interactive pop-music museum inside. With the backdrop of the Seattle Center, you could spend days snapping away.
While you're in town, don't miss the origami-like glass structure of the Seattle Public Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas, which has almost as many photo ops inside as outside.
• Info: Go to www.cityofseattle.net/html/visitor for a visitor's guide to Seattle; www.empsfm.org for the Experience Music Project.
How to shoot...
• The entire building: Traditionally, architecture photographers have lugged large-format cameras to capture buildings without distortion. But you can achieve the same effect with your DSLR and perspective-correction (also called tilt-shift) lenses.
Seattle-based architecture photographer Lara Swimmer, who took these photos, shot EMP for Architectural Record in 2000 with a 4x5 Linhof Technikardan. But she has since made the switch to digital (Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II) and Canon TS-E (tilt-shift) lenses.
Not ready to invest in new glass? Rent a specialty lens for your trip.
If you're using the lens you already have, set it to the widest zoom setting and move back instead of tilting your camera up at the building--you can crop out the extra foreground later. Or try stitching a panorama series shot at 50mm.
Tourists in the way? Don't worry, says Swimmer. A few people in bottom of your composition add a sense of scale to the picture and give the space life.
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| © Lara Swimmer, www.swimmerphoto.com |
• Architectural details: Getting it all in isn't always the point, though. "EMP is so big, there isn't really a way to get an overview of the building," Swimmer says. Instead, focus on details, try various angles, and, of course, walk around and shoot all sides--you'll get different photos each step of the way. Swimmer uses three zooms covering 17mm to 200mm.
Unlike most architecture, Gehry's buildings aren't comprised of many right angles, so you don't need to worry as much about bowing or other distortion caused by your lens or camera angle--normally an obsession with architectural pros.
• Reflections: Gehry buildings are all about curves, angles, and shiny surfaces, so timing is everything. Midday sun is murder, which means shoot early and late to avoid killer spectral highlights.
Try photographing on an overcast day (remember Seattle's rainy reputation?). When the sun is shining, you can usually shoot only the side facing the sun. But overcast skies let you photograph all around the building in one trip.
Long exposures are often necessary in shooting architecture, especially if the light is low and you're using a small aperture to get more depth of field. Bring a tripod.
Metallic buildings can throw off your lightmeter, so spotmeter for midtones and check the histogram preview for clipping, and adjust exposure compensation accordingly.
Glass buildings, such as Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library, are even better for reflections. But they also look great at twilight when lit inside and out--bracket white balance to handle the mixed light, or shoot RAW and combine exposures later.
• Interiors: A tripod is a can't-live-without tool for architecture photographers, but don't take it in--tripods aren't allowed inside EMP. Photography is allowed in the common areas, such as Sound Lab, Sky Church, and the Roots and Branches, but not in the galleries. So enlist your wide-angle lens and higher ISOs to capture the scale and drama of the larger indoor spaces.
White balance? Forget it inside places with a mix of strong natural and artificial light such as the Seattle Public Library. Shoot RAW.
4 More Cities With Gehry's Architecture
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| © Trey Ratcliff, www.stuckincustoms.com |
Boston, MA Beantown specializes in history. For your fix, follow the 2.5-mile Freedom Trail (www.thefreedomtrail.org), which passes 16 noteworthy sites, including Faneuil Hall, the USS Constitution, the site of the Boston Massacre, and photogenic neighborhoods such as Beacon Hill. For your Gehry fix, visit his controversial Stata Center on the campus of MIT in nearby Cambridge. Columns and walls of the buildings tilt, bend, and convene in random curves and angles with bright color and materials ranging from aluminum to brick. Problem is, it's under repair, so beware of scaffolding in your shot. Luckily, it's great to shoot both inside and out. (www.cityofboston.gov)
Los Angeles, CA Frank Gehry's base, making it the ultimate stop on this Gehry U.S. Architecture Tour. Check out www.you-are-here.com, an online photo gallery of everything Los Angeles, from the city's best graffiti to landmark locations. The site also has an index of LA's architecture, with a list of everything Gehry from past to present (with addresses), including his 1978-designed home in Santa Monica, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and some of his early boxy, nonreflective buildings. Take a free audio tour of the Walt Disney Concert Hall to get acquainted with the shiny, sloping structure, but you won't be allowed inside, where photography is prohibited. (www.laphil.com)
Minneapolis, MN An overlooked haven of innovative architecture. The Jean Nouvel-designed Guthrie Theater (www.guthrietheater.org) is a slick, blue steel building in the historic Mill District along the Mississippi River. Across the river is Gehry's Frederick Weisman Museum of Art (www.weisman.umn.edu) on the University of Minnesota campus. This brushed-steel design is more cubist than Gehry's other work. Construction on his expansion of the building is scheduled to start this year, so you might have to adjust your framing, but capturing the reflected colors of sunset and dusk on the building's exterior will be worth it. (www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us)
Chicago, IL The windy city has long been at a center of architectural innovation. The Chicago Architecture Foundation (www.architecture.org) offers daily tours during the summer, including a Frank Lloyd Wright walking tour, an Architecture River Cruise, and a tour devoted to modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Distorted funhouse shots of the city reflected in Anish Kapoor's 33-foot-high bean-shaped Cloud Gate are another must-have shot. Then there's Gehry's famous Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, shown in Trey Ratcliff's photo, below. (www.gochicago.com)
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