Building Shots for C/C

I went for a walk downtown this morning and snapped these photos. Please comment on the photos if you have a spare moment - it's appreciated!

What do you like? What do you not like? What should I try to make these better next time around?

Thanks.

1

What was your thought process before taking the shot? What was your vision with your photo?

I think you have some potentially interesting subject matter here, especially the brick wall with multiple ads painted over. That said, I think the concept could use refinement. Something caught your eye about the wall... how can you express this to the viewer?

Thanks for the response.

In photos 4 and 5 I had a hard time getting this in the viewfinder the way I wanted to. In both images there is a building just below the bottom of the photos, therefore i couldn't get a very unique angle of the building.

I wanted the orange door in photo 4 to be the eye-puller with a sub-focus on the 'layered advertisements' as the heart of the photo. That being said, this paint is very faded and hard to capture. I posted #5 so you can see how it came off of the camera, #4 has a saturation/contrast boost to make the colours pop.

What would you do differently to make the photo better? I can always go re-shoot this shot as it's near my house. Unfortunately it was -2F today so I didn't take the time I would have liked to have taken!

smackitsakic wrote in post #11476198
What would you do differently to make the photo better? I can always go re-shoot this shot as it's near my house. Unfortunately it was -2F today so I didn't take the time I would have liked to have taken!

Really good question. I've struggled with these sorts of compositions.

A few things I would try:
- get closer (I have no idea if this is possible or not; I am guessing it is not)
- can you find a way to incorporate the texture of the brick wall? This may tie in with getting closer.

I don't know what kind of technique I could use to better capture the contrast or the texture of the brick wall. To be honest, if you drove by this wall you probably wouldn't even see it because it is so faded, even though it is a huge wall.

If I were to move any further back there would be junk in the photo (buildings, wires, etc.) and if I moved any closer the angle (top photo) started to get too steep. A lot of the colours in the photo I had to bring out in post processing.

Anyone have any tips in particular that would make this image better in colouring/texture/form​, etc?

Living in an older, small town not too far from an older, small city, I find myself shooting this sort of thing from time to time. It is interesting, challenging, and fun. I particularly like trying to capture the colors and textures of brickwork as in numbers one and two, and exploring the history represented by things such as numbers four and five. I like getting bright, vivid colors in this situation just as you have done here. (I make liberal use of Clarity and Vibrance in Adobe Camera RAW with these types of pictures.)

You might play with cropping and doing some extreme transformations to see how you like the results. For example, in number five try cropping off some of the sky and that bit of architectural detail on the left to concentrate more on the faded signs. Often with shots like these I will try to really tweak them using the transform tool so that they look like they have been shot straight on rather than from street level. Sometimes the result is good and sometimes not, but it is interesting to experiment with, anyway.

I guess I'm just rambling here, but the bottom line is I like these and think are the the sort of shots that lend themselves to some experimental post-processing.