I’ve noted before that I find it nearly impossible to compose images of buildings that frame what I find interesting in built environments. The advice I’ve received feels useless unless I want to make this my exclusive focus (primarily, to look for opportunities to get up higher and shoot buildings from unexpected angles). That takes getting permission from building owners unless you want to shoot through glass, which generally doesn’t look good even with a polarizing filter on the lens.
The one exception is that every once in a while you can see a way to shoot several buildings with dramatically different shapes in a way that makes for an interesting geometrical contrast. Hence this shot in London, which has the added benefit of a thematic display of the names of the Greek muses at the bottom (though that almost detracts from the shot because it pulls the eye down and calls attention to the fact that there’s something down there that’s off the edge of the frame—if I were the kind of photographer who fusses over things in Photoshop, I’d certainly take out the stray lighting element on the bottom right corner).
I know it’s something of a refrain in this particular column, but once again I’m struck at how you hit a limit with anything where you’re self-taught. You either have to decide to focus intensely on your areas of limitation to understand why you are not satisfied and look for work by others that might help you break through, then reverse-engineer what that work is doing, or you just learn to stay away from the unfamiliar treads of that path. Or you look for a teacher or a course. The problem there is always that the self-taught know quite a lot in some directions, some of it painfully wrong from the perspective of orthodox teaching, and know almost nothing in other directions, and whenever they enter into a more conventionally sequenced course of instruction, they are frustrated as students and frustrating for teachers.