Top 250 Firms: Titans Maintain Lead While Industry Suffers - Practice Matters | Architectural Record

I've been fortunate to work with 10 of these firms in the last few years. I'm especially happy with Dekker Perich Sabatini's inclusion. They have been one of my favorite clients for the past 20+ years. ‎"D/P/S is pleased to announce that we were recently honored by Architectural Record as one of the Top 250 Architecture Firms in the nation! We would like to thank and share this honor with all of our clients and consultants. Without you our success would not be possible!"
AR

Photoshop charges....

An interesting discussion going on at Luminous Landscape about charging your clients for your Photoshop work. " Drawing the Line on Re-touching"
LL

Jamey Stillings superb bridge images.

This IMHO is one of the great AP projects of the last ten years.
Hoover Bypass Bridge images

Architecture Daily Photographers

Here are some interesting words and images by and about some good international APs AD Photographers.

The expense of shooting digital?

I love shooting film in view cameras and still do it for my personal work. From a subscribers post a point was made about how cheap traditional film and camera equipment is compared to digital. What got me to change? I was probably the last AP in my area to switch to digital from 4x5 and film. My camera was 50 years old and still performing fine! All my 4x5 equipment was long paid for and still very functional. Three things finally got me to switch. First we lost our only local lab. Second the scanning workflow was dreadfully long. I couldn't meet tight deadlines. A part of this was processing and scanning fees were going out the door to labs in digital this became "Capture and Processing fees" which stayed in my pocket. I was spending 30k a year on film, processing, polaroid  and scanning. Third was the development of a reasonably priced full frame DSLR-the 5D.

I am far more profitable and productive with digital. And since there is no penalty for trying things in weird light, I tend to be more creative too.

THIS is fun work!

John Chervinsky-
An experiment in Perspective
Wow what can you do with some old odds and ends against a black board with some chalk. The link takes you to a PDF slideshow to download.

The high end equipment dilema......

IME There is a difference between "cutting corners" and making financially wise equipment purchases for your business. Can you get by with a small sensor entry level camera or do you really want to spring for a full frame DSLR and tilt/shift lenses. Cutting corners is putting short term profits over long term quality. The fact that your clients haven't complained about the images you are producing with an entry level camera doesn't mean much IMO. Its not where you are now but where do you want to go? Local realtors pay allot less than top architects for AP. Top architects are far more demanding in terms of vision and quality than local realtors. Where are you now vs. where do you want to be in 5 years? Getting by with acceptable quality or at the top of your field? If you want to be at the top of your field you want to begin producing images NOW that will impress the clients where you want to be in 5 years both in terms of vision and image quality. Your standards must exceed your clients. Then you don't have to worry about whether your images are "good enough".

And then what about a top of the line medium format camera like the Arca I mention in an earlier post? That Arca with a 45MP back and a couple of lenses can run.......what 50K? Is it overkill?

HDR what is too far....

An interesting discussion on LuLa about HDRing interiors. Although this guy did not use an HDR program perse, I think he went too far. It looks unnatural too me. What is too much? What do you think?
See this earlier blog post too about this image from a shoot in Reno.

Historic Preservation-get involved!

This is extremely important. If any of you live near one of these projects-get involved please! Photographers can do allot in these preservation campaigns.

http://blog.preservationnation.org/2011/06/15/announcing-americas-11-most-endangered-historic-places/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Blog-Announcement&utm_campaign=11Most-Homepage

New Arca Video

Descriptive materials on Arcas are almost never to be found. Rod Klukas put together this video on the latest Arca MF digital technical camera. This camera is the state of the art digital camera for architecture used by leading APs all over the world. Sweet!

Interview

I'm being interviewed today for a magazine article about my work in an upcoming group show this fall in Santa Fe. I just read the questions. It is so great when somebody actually "gets" the essence of your art work. That is depressingly rare. I'm stoked. More on this when the magazine is coming out.