Stacking Architectural photography

Stacking Architectural Photographs for property developement clients

Here is my main use of stacking architectural photographs. Often as professional architectural photographers we get frustrated as we are shooting a scene because even with a wide angle lens, we cannot see enough of the top or bottom of the room or the building. The ceiling architecture of rooms are often the calling cards of the architects and the builders, and they want to see their work in the photograph. Shooting with any lens under 17 mm will really start distorting the image on the edges, as a fish eye lens will do. In order to provide my architectural clients with a larger image, I will merge an upper image which features the ceiling, and a lower images which features more of the floor and the foreground. I can do this with the Canon 17 mm tilt shift lens because all I have to do is shift the lens up and down to get these two images.

Univ Crossings student housing upper image

Univ Crossings student housing bottom image

Photoshop then merges the two seamlessly.

Univ Crossings merged top and bottom big

Now I have a master image that is not a 3×2 landscape aspect ratio, which is what comes out of the camera, but instead, depending on my final crop, I get a 1×1 or square image – the same width as the native capture but taller, and often a much taller image than square like a 1 x 1.3 aspect ratio. Suffice it to say that stacking architectural photographs provides my clients with more “real estate” in the image and gives my cleints’ advertising and marketing design team  me more latitude to crop vertically or horizontally depending on the need of the ad layout. The images also now has the feel of the kind of image that might come from a medium format camera.