For someone who really likes strong lines (leading, intersecting, away) in his photographs, I’ve somehow never taken to architectural photography. More than a decade or so ago, I was a production assistant to a very famous architectural photographer from Bombay, and using skills learned on that job, I managed to score a couple of small gigs in the field. Beyond that, I never developed the thinking and framing muscles for such kind of photography.
All that seems to have changed in the past few months. The primary catalyst seems to have been my recently acquired iPhone 13 Pro and its 77mm ‘telephoto’ lens. Now, most architectural photographers would simply dismiss such a focal length for taking pictures of buildings as a joke, but I really, really like the medium compression such a lens engenders. It is not the sharpest lens either, but there is a certain kind of look it has, especially when shot using RAW.
A secondary reason is that I’ve been really enjoying developing RAW images using the Darkroom app. My Capture One subscription is up for renewal soon, and I am seriously debating dropping it in favour of Darkroom, which at a quarter of the price is quite a steal. My only hesitation stems from the fact that Apple does not handle my Fuji X-T20’s lossless compressed RAW files and I usually shoot in that mode to save space on SD cards (Darkroom uses the built-in Photos app as its library container and browser).
