Page’s Houston office recently completed a very engaging campus project for Baker Ripley’s East Aldine location. The project includes many unique spaces intended to help the surrounding community with support facilities for projects and businesses that members may otherwise not have access to including a fab lab (think makers space), commercial kitchen and much more.
For the second video in my YouTube series, I thought I would share a technique that many architectural photographer’s employ, which is the stitch panoramic. A stitch pano is a way to create a larger viewing area than available from a particular focal length by combining different frames using the movements that are possible with either a technical camera or tilt-shift lenses on a DSLR. One challenging part of employing this technique that those of us who are using a DSLR with tilt-shift lenses experience is a slight misalignment of those frames due to parallax which results from the movements happening in the lens while the sensor remains in one place. With technical cameras you are able to shift the sensor around while the glass remains in the same place, allowing for much simpler aligning. I mention this because some people will likely notice this slight discrepancy in the video, which I later went back and corrected for the final image.
This image was created in order to show a community room and its relationship with a couple of the other buildings on the campus and the courtyard that separates them. The space had great, large windows that provided lovely natural light. We aimed to emphasize the natural light a bit with the use of strobes while also cleaning up some of the color cast. Adding a couple of models (which included one of the designer’s from Page and the expert billiards hand of my asssistant, Spencer Young) provides a sense of scale and more emphasis on the spaces functions. The room was a little cluttered from daily use when we arrived, so we spent a fair amount of time clearing some unwanted items out and getting things just how we wanted them for the image. Staging also meant getting the pool table just where we wanted it so it would anchor this one point perspective, creating some symmetry in an otherwise asymmetrical space.
