Look around on the web, and you’ll find plenty of photographs of Google’s colorful offices in Mountain View (AKA the Googleplex) and around the world. Finding images shot from inside the company’s tightly-guarded data centers is much harder, since only a handful of employees are allowed to roam the spaces where the “web lives.” However, Google recently invited photographer Connie Zhou inside a number of its high-tech data centers. Gorgeous photographs resulted — images that show incredible scale, mind-numbing repetition, and quirky colors. Read more…
In addition to being an internationally successful musician, Moby is also an avid photographer. He began shooting photos at the age of 10, and has since held numerous exhibitions around the world and published a photo book titled “Destroyed” (a title it shares with an album released at the same time). In the video above, Moby talks about his passion for shooting architectural photographs in Los Angeles, and also the photoblog he maintains through which he shares his work.
Remember those beautiful macro photos that showed the inside of musical instruments as giant rooms? Sao Paolo, Brazil-based photographer Valentino Fialdini did something similar, except instead of musical instruments he used small chambers created out of LEGO blocks. With some clever lighting and camera trickery, Fialdini captured the tiny rooms and corridors as to look like giant architectural spaces. Read more…
Architectural photographer Brett Beyer was recently commissioned by Cornell University to make a photograph of the interior of its recently completed Milstein Hall. The request wasn’t for a standard interior photo, but for an aerial shot of the 25,000-square-foot studio space that looked as if you were looking down at it with the roof removed (think Google Earth but for the interior of a building). Beyer accomplished this by pointing his Canon 5D Mark II and 17-40mm lens down from the ceiling on a 12-foot boom and then capturing 250 separate photographs of every square inch of the space over three days. He then spent 10 days stitching the images together by hand in Photoshop to create the amazing photo seen above. Read more…
Here’s a brief video in which Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Kelley shares his technique for lighting large architectural spaces using small flash units. Kelley captures hundreds of photographs of each scene and the combines them afterwards in Photoshop. Back in September we shared an interesting time-lapse walkthrough by Kelley showing how he shoots home exteriors with the same technique.
Here’s an educational time-lapse tutorial by Los Angeles-based architectural photographer Mike Kelley in which he walks through how he goes about photographing buildings. His technique might be described “manual HDR” — after shooting the building over a longish period of time to capture different lightings, he then enters the scene and lights different areas of the building using two Canon 430EX Speedlites. Afterward, he loads the stills into Photoshop and selects different portions of the scene from different photos depending on the lighting he wants. The finished composite photo ends up looking as if it were lit by a large number of Speedlites.
