Frédéric’s top tips

1 Consider a castle or a building as a human being and practise architecture photography as if it were portrait photography. Look for the best pro le.

2 Your partner is natural light. You’re depending on it. Be patient and try not to miss the right moment. Each time of the day, from dawn till sunset, brings a different atmosphere. Choose the speci c one you’re looking for. For example, dusk will offer you the opportunity for dramatic, romantic, backlit compositions.

3 I look for neutral photography and avoid distortions. I try to face the building horizontally in order to respect its volume. It’s tough, but if you cannot, just be extreme. Your creative bias must be clearly asserted.

4 Slow motion shutter speeds, on a tripod, and a high diaphragm will bring a sharp vision of the subject and offer the best depth of eld to clearly reveal the surroundings. On a big format print it will look like an open window for the viewers.

5 The rst impression and feeling you get when you discover a building is always at a distance, so you need to nd the right distance to try to create this speci c mood and emotion that you felt when discovering the building. Sometimes, to avoid being dull, I take some of the pictures very close to the subject but I would spontaneously move and more often keep at a distance.

6 When you’re shooting castles most of them have been widely documented, so what is challenging and dif cult is to nd some kind of way of shooting them that won’t look too familiar and that will bring some kind of new perspective.