Finding new perspectives in architectural photography can really yield some striking and compelling images. Usually I get stuck working from a low point of view looking up. This time, however, I noticed the very striking lines and forms of the open atrium tower of our hotel in Panama City. I leaned over the balcony as far as I dared, opened up to as wide a focal length as I was able, tried to get everything square and snapped the photo. The extremely wide angle lens helps to emphasize the compression of the image at the vanishing point. Every line in the image pulls you down to the point at the middle of the frame and you feel as though you could fall into the picture. Line and form where so important in this image that it had to be in black and white. Even though the hardwood floors of the balconies on the right were a rich red the colour only really distracted from the power of the image.

-Russell Berg

Here's another look at how I have interpreted form and shape in architecture

www.seeingberg.com

I have found the city of Victoria and it’s architecture to be a significant inspiration for me. There is something that strikes me as I wander those streets with my camera that pushes the photographer in me to see things differently. I find the parts of a city that are on the edges of survival to have a truth in them that is so much more beautiful than the manicured lawns and refinished driveways of suburbia. The texture of this wall jumped out at me as a wonderful background to the three black openings of the windows. The texture of the glass that remains in the windows provides an interesting counterpoint to the yawning darkness below. The rusty stains around the edges and the lichens growing on the window sills bear silent testimony to dozens of winters, to hundreds of eyes looking out, to the arms resting on summer evenings watching the city walk by.

Other Victoria images here, here, and here

-Russell Berg

Vanishing Point

Elbow on the Sill