Architectural photography - advise

Here are my tips and advice for night time architectural photography.

Who am I? I’m an experienced professional photographer, working in Manchester, the North West and nationally, with over twenty years construction photography experience. I’ve worked as a commercial photographer around Manchester, primarily specialising in photographing buildings for a variety of commercial clients including Architects, Construction companies, Builders and Housing associations / Trusts .

As a professional photographer I’m quite often asked to provide night time photographs for my architectural clients. I thought I would share some of the techniques and tricks I’ve learnt with you.

Firstly, the most important piece of photographic equipment is …… wait for it …a really good, solid tripod. It needs to be heavy enough to hold your camera for quite long exposures, possibly running into the 10′s of seconds. For a recent professional photography commission, some of the exposures were at 15 -20 seconds.

The camera used could be pretty much anything as long as it has a tripod mount on it and some manual exposure controls. If you are a professional buildings photographer then you definately should get a camera with noise reduction as an option and also ‘mirror lock up’ to reduce camera shake.

If you are doing this as a bit of fun rather than as an architectural commission then a good choice of building would obviously be one that has plenty of glass in it ! I don’t find that old buildings in Manchester photograph very well. You really need a nice modern build with plenty of glass.

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Arrive at least half an hour before dusk to plan your shot and get into position. Despite the fact that these are night photographs they still look better with a blue sky. They should really be re-named dusk photographs as this time yields the best results. At dusk the sky will go a nice deep indigo colour that looks great on the photographs.

Technique; at dusk take a light reading inside the building or from just the outside of the glazing. This should be done at dusk as the inside of the building starts to ‘glow’ i.e the interior starts to become visible. This will be your exposure. Let’s say that it’s 2 seconds at F11.

We then set up and frame our shot and wait for the ambient light to drop 2 – 3 stops below 2 seconds which would be 4s or 8s. We shoot at 2 seconds exposing for the interior lights but our exterior has now dropped to 2-3 stops below.

I generally keep shooting until its fully dark but usually find that there is a premium time of about 10 minutes when there is enough light left to render details on the outside of the building before they disappear into darkness.

You can view more examples of my work on my Architectural Galleries page .

Here is another job for Pozzoni LLP, based in Altrincham, Cheshire.

This was a quick job photographing a recently completed Travel Lodge in Manchester.

It was quite hard to find anywhere to stand and set-up a tripod as there were lots of parked cars about.

I ended up using an extremely wide angle lens ( 15mm ) and then doing a fair amount of Photoshop work to get everything looking nice and perpendicular.

You can view other examples of Manchester architectural photography in my Architectural Galleries .

Here is a selection of ‘head and shoulders’ portraits, taken for Atkins at their Manchester and Cheshire offices.

Despite the affordability of digital cameras, its good to know, that my clients still recognise the difference in quality that a professional photographer can make.

My portable portrait studio can be quikly set-up in your office. I can usually take 30-40 staff portraits in an hour.

Whether you require an individual portrait of your MD or ‘head shots’ of your entire workforce
please don’t hesitate to contact me for a competertive quote. There are other examples on my ‘P.R. Gallery’ pages.

Manchester Architectural Photography


Here is an other recent job for Pozzoni LLP, based in Altrincham, Cheshire.

Once again it’s good to get into some architectural photography in Cheshire and the North West.

This is Blessed Thomas Holford Sixth Form College in Altrincham, Cheshire.
The building was crying out for a night shot to show of the curved glazing and coloured blinds. As space was quite limited I had to use an extreemly wide angle lens and then correct the perspective in Photoshop.You can view other examples of Manchester architectural photography in my Architectural Gallery