Awards submissions have their own demands: a defensible representation of the work, usually including the elevations and details that carry the concept rather than only the flattering three-quarter view.
Who I work with
Architectural Photography for Architects
Photography built around how architects use images: awards submissions, practice portfolios, and publication, with licensing that covers the whole project team.
My father is an architect, and so are my sister and my brother. I was briefly headed the same way, but photography and developing software interested me more, and today I am a software architect as well as a photographer. It still started with buildings: as a teenager I drew up floor plans to scale for my father’s home-addition work, then modeled them in three dimensions, which is how I ended up taking photographs in the first place — I needed textures for the models.
That background shows up in what I point the camera at. A building has ideas in it, and the photographs should carry them rather than merely record that the building exists.
What tends to matter to a practice
Keeping verticals vertical. A converging elevation reads as an error to anyone who draws buildings for a living. I keep the camera level, shoot wide, and crop the composition from the high-resolution frame so the verticals start out straight, with any final correction made in editing.
Interiors that keep the view. Where a window was placed to frame something, losing it to a blown-out white rectangle discards the decision. A 100-megapixel medium-format capture holds the room and the view in one frame, so that decision survives.
The light the building was designed for. I wrote software that forecasts conditions, so a shoot can be scheduled for when the building will look as intended rather than whenever the calendar allowed.
Licensing across the project team
A project usually has several parties who each want the photographs — the practice, the contractor, the designer, the owner — so the fee is set per business, and every business that joins lowers the price for all of them. Four firms sharing one half-day shoot each pay less than half of what a single firm would pay alone. See pricing and licensing and usage.
Work beyond Richmond
Most of what I shoot is near Richmond, but I work across Virginia and travel further — including for clients as far as Idaho. If your practice has projects across several states and would rather brief one photographer than a different one in each city, that is straightforward to arrange.
Credit
I credit and link to the architect on every project page, and I would ask the same in return where the photographs appear on yours.
See pricing, or read what a shoot involves.