I’ve been taking some new shots this past week, but I haven’t processed them. A fair amount have been of buildings and I just remain kind of baffled about the compositional challenges.
On one photography board I used to frequent, there was an amateur photographer who I thought did great work on buildings, cityscapes and constructions. I asked him for his thoughts and he said, “When you can, try to find a place to shoot from that isn’t just the street-level view. That compresses your choices a lot.” The problem, of course, is that for the most part, you can’t just enter any building, climb the stairs, throw open a window and get a new visual lease on life. You can’t get onto the roof of most buildings. The high vantage points that are readily available to all generally become just as much of a visual cliche as the ground-level shots if we’re talking famous buildings and vistas.
Another strategy, it seems to me, is to look for buildings small enough that you can fit them in the frame and isolate them as subjects while not being ridiculously far away, look for buildings that are rather homely or ordinary until you manage to find some way to call attention to how interesting they are. Ruined or abandoned buildings are a famous choice here, but also I think buildings with old signage or buildings that just represent a common type of business or residence.
The harder thing is to take a slice, piece or part of a built structure and make it compositionally coherent. I’ve been trying that this week so far and nothing has really felt like a big success. I’ll keep at it. There’s also the classic move of looking for a building to contrast to or talk to a person or animal in the frame and there maybe I think I got a few shots this weekend that I might want to work on a bit.