Games for People Who Enjoy Architectural Photography

Carmen’s first assignment at an architecture firm is to photograph the inside of an opulent, dreamlike mansion. Each room is a 360-degree scene you examine through a phone camera while hunting for objects. Take a second look around the foyer before snapping anything. A room that first reads as a single grand composition has a lot going on at its edges.

At Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Shrine, rows of red torii gates make a long passage out of repeated uprights. Try holding the center line, then moving to one side to see what happens to the rhythm of the openings. The simulator lets you adjust the light angle as well as focus and exposure, so you can see how shadows change the passage without moving the camera.

In a near-future Tauranga, you collect photo bounties and earn more for strong composition, color, and content. Start with the rooftops and pay attention to what ends up behind your subject. A change of lens or a few steps sideways can turn the same scene from a portrait into a photograph about where people live.

Explore places such as the National Palace and the former Convent of La Merced as photojournalist Juan Aguirre. Juan looks down into a waist-level viewfinder inspired by vintage cameras. With aperture and zoom available, it’s worth deciding how much of a room to include before looking down to make the picture.

A routine assignment sends a structural analyst through the aging infrastructure of Stalburg, camera in hand. At the Hammer Valley Dam, the things worth recording include a damaged platform that’s easy to overlook when you’re taking in the whole structure. The job changes which details you stop for and how closely you look before moving on.

Place a photograph in front of you and the scene inside it becomes part of the space you can walk through. A frame that’s pleasing to look at may be useless for getting across a gap. Now the angle you shoot from and where you place the image decide whether the new geometry lines up with the path you need.

Dei uses photographs from his mother’s travels as guides to recreating their compositions. Look for a light source or a piece of furniture that tells you how the old shot was set up, then arrange the objects and choose your angle and focus. The hand-drawn interiors make a good exercise in seeing how a window or lamp gives a familiar room its shape.

The factory exhaust rises out of an old church steeple. Follow that landmark to the quarry and the building starts to read as both a former church and an industrial site. Architect Deanna Van Buren designed this conversion as part of the island’s history. It’s a reason to look at the building from a distance and then go closer to see what survived the change of use.

The buildings repeat in every direction, and changing gravity lets you stand on a surface you just looked at as a wall. Pause at the edge of a structure and use the repeating stairways and platforms to see how changing your orientation reorganizes the whole view. Falling far enough can bring you back to the geometry you started with.