Go abstract with architecture

Create great abstract images using buildings as your subjects

There’s no one ‘magic bullet’ for abstract architectural photography. Some extra lenses will help, and you need a location with inspiring architecture, but most of all you need to be able to see lines, shapes and perspectives in a particular way.

These shapes and lines are the real subject, not the buildings themselves. You can make a great picture out of something as mundane as a row of windows in a concrete office block. With abstract photography, it’s not the subject itself that makes the picture, but the way you shoot it.

How do you train your eye to see interesting shots in details? This is where changing lenses will help! We took a trip to Cardiff Bay armed with a Nikon Df and 50mm lens, but we also took a 14-24mm super-wide-angle and 70-300mm telephoto. While usually you use super-wide lenses to ‘get more in and telephotos to shoot distant subjects, they do more than that. They change the relationship

These shapes and lines are the real subject, not the buildings themselves. You can make a great picture out of something as mundane as a row of windows in a concrete office block

between near and far objects, they alter perspectives and can make ordinary objects look very different.

You should also break the rules. Classical architectural photography rejects ‘converging verticals’, but in abstract photography you can turn these into a feature, angling a super-wide-angle lens upwards to produce strongly converging lines. You can use telephotos to make distant objects bigger, separating details in buildings from their surroundings so that any sense of scale or context is lost.

Finally, the simplest compositions can be the most successful. A shot of a single detail can work really well.