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Level, rise, tilt. Then we wait for cloud.

A single-storey board-marked concrete house at the end of a gravel path, under an even grey sky.

Rise 28 millimetres, tilt 3 degrees, sharp from 4 metres to infinity.

Upside down, as a view camera sees it. Drag the knob up to raise the lens.

Keys: arrows raise and shift, T tilts, F focuses, U turns it upright.

Photographs of buildings and interiors across South Australia, for the architects, builders and interior designers who made them. On a large-format view camera and on digital, planned around the way each building faces, with the verticals kept straight.

Plan a shootSee recent buildings

Setting up the camera

The house on the glass, set up the way we set up every building. The order matters: each movement depends on the one before.

Level

Before anything moves, the back goes dead level, side to side and front to back. Every correction after this depends on it.

Rise

Pointing a camera up at a building makes the walls lean in, as if it were falling away from you. We keep the back level and raise the lens instead, so the roof comes into frame and the walls stay parallel, the way they were drawn.

Shift

Sliding the lens sideways lets us stand clear of a tree, a post or our own reflection in the glass, and still draw the front square.

Tilt

A few degrees of lens tilt lays the plane of focus along the ground instead of across it. The path at our feet and the roofline come sharp together, at an aperture the light allows.

Seen from the side: the film, the lens tilted forward (drawn four times steeper than it is) and the plane of focus, which swings about the hinge below the lens.

Focus

Under the cloth, with a loupe on the glass, we check the near corner and the far one until they agree.

Expose

Then we close the lens, pull the darkslide and wait for the cloud to come over. On digital, we make the same frame on the same camera.

Which way it faces

Before we bring the camera, we read the plan and the forecast.

North

The north face has the sun most of the day, so we photograph it early, while the light still rakes across the walls.

West

West glass we leave until blue hour, when the rooms are lit and the sky outside is as bright as they are.

East

East rooms are at their best in the first two hours. We set up in the dark and wait.

South

A south wall gets no direct sun through winter. We wait for high, even cloud, and it shows every joint in the concrete.

If the weather turns, we move the day.

Buildings when they’re finished, before anyone moves in

The garden side of the concrete house at dusk: the lit living room behind a long wall of glass, board-marked concrete piers and a low stone wall above the planting.
The garden side of the same house at dusk, and three frames we’d make of it.
Show a frame on the photograph

New houses, additions and alterations, small workplaces and civic buildings, outside and in.

Rooms styled the way the designer left them. We balance the lamps with the window and keep door frames and joinery plumb.

A joint in the concrete, the edge of a stone wall, the grain of a batten screen, photographed square-on.

We photograph a building empty: no people in frame, no cars on the drive, nothing moved in yet.

Recent buildings

Three buildings from the past year, with our notes on the frame. Tap a mark, or step through them.

A long limestone house set into a grassy slope in the hills, its glass front reflecting a grey sky.

A limestone house, Adelaide Hills
  1. 90 mm lens, 14 mm of rise. Standing back up the slope, we needed less than usual.
  2. We waited two days for high cloud. In sun the glass mirrored the gums and you couldn’t see into the rooms.
  3. 2° of tilt lays the focus along the slope, so the grass at the front edge holds its detail.
A folded concrete stair beside a timber batten screen, lit by a tall slot window.

A stair hall, the eastern suburbs

Interiors are photographed as they were designed: lamps balanced with the window, furniture where it was placed, door frames plumb.

  1. Lamps off, daylight only. The slot window gives the concrete its edge.
  2. 65 mm lens, back dead plumb at landing height, 10 mm of shift to clear the balustrade.
A brick warehouse with a sawtooth roof at dusk, warm light in its tall steel windows.
A warehouse turned studio, the inner west

  1. Blue hour: the few minutes when the sky outside matches the rooms.
  2. 32 mm of rise. The roofline is high and the street is narrow, so there was nowhere further back to stand.
  3. Two exposures on digital, one for the sky and one for the rooms, blended by hand. Nothing added that wasn’t there.

Sheet film, and digital

For the one frame an architect wants to keep and print large: a single sheet of 4 x 5 film, slow and deliberate, scanned at full size.

For the full set of a building, inside and out, made on the same camera with the same movements, with exposures bracketed for the view out the window.

A 4 x 5 holder, its darkslide half outA digital back on the same camera

What comes back to you

A set of finished photographs of the building, verticals straightened in the camera rather than stretched afterwards, colour matched across the rooms, sized for print and for the web, with a plan marked where each view was taken.

A single-storey house plan marked with five views: the front from the path, the living room towards the garden, the kitchen from the dining table, the hall end to end, and the garden side at dusk Front, from the path Living room, towards the garden Kitchen, from the dining table The hall, end to end Garden side, at dusk
The plan that comes with the set: a dot where the camera stood, a wedge for what it saw.

What we don’t do. Add people who weren’t there. Drop in a sky from another day. Stretch a wide lens to fit a room.

Plan a shoot

Tell us about the building and when it will be finished. We’ll look at the plan and the orientation and come back with a day and a time to aim for.

Who are you?
Which way does the main face look?
Film, digital, or not sure?