Architecture & Landscape Photography
Anna loves the art of architectural photography. A building can be represented in so many ways by using a suite of lenses from different viewpoints, at ground level, and from the sky above, with a different depth of field. The images may be accurate representations of a structure or have a wildly distorted drama and scale. The foreground and background may be kept in sharp focus, or alternatively a shallow depth of field may be selected to highlight a feature of a building.
There is the magic and satisfaction of being there at the optimal time of day, when the direction and balance of the light are perfect. And at night buildings take on another guise and can be lit by exterior building lights, interior building lights, streetlights, or even the moon.
Shadows, vertical lines, diagonal lines, horizontal lines, colour, reflective windows, the surrounding enviroment……. can all be used to create interesting compositions which lead the eye to the building.
Although Anna loves to use a fish-eye lens where it is appropriate, her conventional engineering background usually persuades her to keep vertical lines parallel (non-converging) when photographing buildings. This is achieved by shifting the lens relative to the film plane using a tilt and shift lens.
A bird’s eye viewpoint readily accessible by photographing from a drone has opened up a world of possibilities to a creative architectural photographer. As long as it is not raining, and not excessively windy!
Photography from a drone is ideal to capture aerial images of buildings, engineering structures and landscapes which formerly required the hire of a helicopter. Although Anna LOVES helicopter photography, today the expense is prohibitive. So she willingly trained as a drone pilot – ESSENTIAL for her work at the £1.4 billion Queensferry Crossing in Edinburgh where she was the official creative photographer (2011-2017). She is a CAA-approved pilot with the PfCO (Operational Authorisation).
Aerial Drone Photography and Video
Anna loves the great outdoors, especially the mountains of Scotland where it is particularly satisfying photographing a landscape rendered sublime by spectacular, and often unpredictable, lighting. If the weather forecast is for light wind, then she always carries a drone in her backpack. The drone often escapes at the top of a munro!
She also leads an annual landscape photography holiday (bootcamp) to Iceland in search of spectacular scenery and the Northern Lights.