Architectural photography: tips and life hacks from Artyom Arutyunov | Articles | Photo, video, optics

Pret­ty fun­ny. I start­ed with nature — I was attract­ed by the way it looks in the sun­set light, what mag­i­cal scenes can be obtained if you just lean down. But then I real­ized that it was banal and easy. And I decid­ed to retrain myself. The choice fell on archi­tec­tur­al pho­tog­ra­phy, because at that moment I did not under­stand how to shoot a task beau­ti­ful­ly in the con­text of mak­ing it look dif­fer­ent from what it real­ly is. That is, how to add some­thing from your­self, because an archi­tec­tur­al work is a fin­ished prod­uct. I came to this skill only after five or six years of my cre­ative path.

Then I took a pic­ture of a stat­ue in Kolomen­skoye dur­ing flow­er­ing, and this pic­ture went to every­one. After a friend said: “Arty­om, if you like sculp­ture so much, let’s go to the Pushkin Muse­um.” It was at this point that the biggest shift in my pho­tog­ra­phy took place — I was intro­duced to aca­d­e­m­ic art, sculp­ture, Renais­sance, Baroque and Goth­ic archi­tec­ture. I fell in love with archi­tec­ture. In its form, con­tent, in the way his­tor­i­cal epochs stand out from each oth­er, what ele­ments attract atten­tion. At that moment, I had a click, and I began to pur­pose­ful­ly shoot archi­tec­ture.

Refine­ment of col­or con­tent, cre­ation of a unique pic­ture. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I did not trans­fer any­thing in terms of the form from the shoot­ing of aca­d­e­m­ic art. When you shoot it, you shoot what is, with­out invent­ing it. Oth­er­wise, it may turn out to be non­sense, because there is a lot tied to the con­nec­tion of chiaroscuro and col­or.

I have only one prin­ci­ple — to shoot archi­tec­ture in such a way that there is noth­ing in the pic­ture that would dis­tract the view­er’s atten­tion. Oth­er objects, peo­ple, visu­al garbage. My goal is to con­vey archi­tec­ture in the most abstract and mean­ing­ful way pos­si­ble.

I am self-taught, so for me the most impor­tant point is the lack of ref­er­ence. I try not to con­tact oth­er authors, not to take inspir­ing moments from films and oth­er mass media prod­ucts. I am a sup­port­er of the max­i­mum iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of myself with my activ­i­ty, and I want it to be a reflec­tion of my views on the world, prin­ci­ples, ideas. The moment I start replac­ing my ideas with ref­er­ences and some­thing seen from the out­side, I will start replac­ing my own iden­ti­ty.

I try to be in an infor­ma­tion vac­u­um. For exam­ple, I almost nev­er scroll through the Insta­gram and VK feeds. I love uncom­pli­cat­ed rea­son, pure flight of con­scious­ness. Then you cre­ate the most “hon­est” prod­uct. Because it is yours, you saw it your­self, paint­ed it your­self, filmed it your­self. If you come to a loca­tion to do like some­one else, then this is already an unnec­es­sary activ­i­ty. There are already many such pho­tog­ra­phers, but I try to be myself.

You need to under­stand what you like, what touch­es you, makes you reflect, what would you like to show. Every­thing depends on the response, method and pre­sen­ta­tion. Archi­tec­ture is a com­plete object. The peo­ple who built the build­ing designed it to be as pho­to­genic as pos­si­ble. From myself, it remains to add only a look and per­cep­tion. Archi­tec­tur­al pho­tog­ra­phy rests not on the idea, but on visu­al and aes­thet­ic tech­niques. There­fore, the search for style is to fol­low your own taste pref­er­ences.

There are no clear cri­te­ria. Every­thing rests on my sub­jec­tive per­cep­tion, a sense of aes­thet­ics and beau­ty. That is, if I under­stand that I can shoot this object some­how wrong, bring some­thing autho­r­i­al, then I take up shoot­ing.

It’s all pret­ty pro­sa­ic. I go to the site suncalc.net and, if the object is in Moscow, I def­i­nite­ly look at the sun­di­al to under­stand what time is best to be there so as not to shoot against the light. I also often get along with the cards, because going through the whole of Moscow is a rather dif­fi­cult task. Of course, I did it, because I shoot archi­tec­ture for a long time, but just wan­der­ing around the indus­tri­al zones is a stu­pid idea. There­fore, it is bet­ter to study the panora­mas, high­light the areas where it is most inter­est­ing to shoot. I call it “loca­tion scout­ing”.

Anoth­er prob­lem is that in fact we can not shoot tem­ples. As soon as you enter the tem­ple and raise the cam­era, you are imme­di­ate­ly sur­round­ed by guards, abbots. In Europe, I can freely shoot almost all cathe­drals with­out using a tri­pod and flash. In Rus­sia, you need to get per­mis­sion. For exam­ple, pho­tog­ra­phy is pro­hib­it­ed in the Cathe­dral of Christ the Sav­ior. To do this, you need to write to the abbot, ask for per­mis­sion, and then show it to each guard, because absolute­ly every­one will approach you. It kills the fun of the process, it makes no sense. I am for peo­ple to enjoy, so that cer­tain process­es do not turn into tor­ture.

Post-pro­duc­tion is the most impor­tant thing for me. For exam­ple, in inte­ri­or shoot­ing there are often a lot of yel­low lamps. In fact, you end up with a pic­ture that has 50 shades of yel­low, and I don’t like that. I like to twist the slid­ers, to search. Plus, for me, the pic­ture tak­en from the cam­era is not a clear rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what it real­ly is, it is very far from my cre­ative per­cep­tion, so often every­thing needs to be fin­ished in graph­ic edi­tors.

A tricky ques­tion, because both shoot­ing and edit­ing will be easy if you come to the shoot with a cer­tain cre­ative sense of the place. If you come with the con­scious­ness that you want to show, it will be easy. Anoth­er ques­tion is whether you have a pic­ture in your head, what dic­tat­ed it. That is, it is a ques­tion of prepa­ra­tion for shoot­ing, stuffed hands.
When you are just start­ing, of course, it will not be easy to remove, and even hard­er to process. A lot also rests on tech­ni­cal issues — the pres­ence of the nec­es­sary optics, light, a cam­era that will not allow detail to be lost and noise to appear.

Archi­tec­tur­al pho­tog­ra­phy is all about the skill of work­ing with the source mate­r­i­al and its pre­sen­ta­tion. Do what you love, don’t get dis­tract­ed by stu­pid fac­tors like trends. I believe that at the moment when each author begins to pur­sue only his own vision, we will get a real author’s envi­ron­ment, and not a ser­pen­tar­i­um that we don’t want to be relat­ed to. Indeed, most often it rests on inten­sives, mas­ter class­es and “let’s raise mon­ey”. It’s not about cre­ativ­i­ty. Cre­ativ­i­ty is about desire, abil­i­ty and ambi­tion. So look for your­self.