Which cam for outdoor beauty shots

[George Loch]

Keep in mind that I am talking about landscape architecture and not architecture in general. The beauty of a landscape is in the details and in the created spaces. Just showing wide, landscape shots of the overall property is less compelling. I am shooting 90% with medium, tight and even with macro lenses.

-gl

Perhaps things have changed about aesthetics of architectural shots... but I just checked my 'reference', Architectural Digest, and most of the shots, whether broad exteriors, exterior detail, or interiors, were 'deep focus'.

Now of course they are probably shooting 4x5 stills (if not 8x10 stills...), but it looks like Deep Focus has not gone out of style for architectural shots.

What I'd recommend is getting a shift and tilt for architectural shots, so you can have such 'angled' shots as looking up, that is the film plan non-parallel with walls or other 'straight up structural elements', and via the shift and tiled, 'correct' for the
usual distortion that occurs with such angled up (or angled down for that matter...) shots.

I personally would not use anything that distorted in a 'fish eye' or similar manner. When I did 4x5 architectural shots back in the olden days, I did spend the 'big bux' at the time for a 90mm (wide angle on a 4x5) that had rectilinear correction... (that is 'no bulging of parallel lines due to wide angle).

There may be a very few stylized shots that get away with such a distortion, but for me, for architecture, typically not.

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Keep in mind that I am talking about landscape architecture and not architecture in general. The beauty of a landscape is in the details and in the created spaces. Just showing wide, landscape shots of the overall property is less compelling. I am shooting 90% with medium, tight and even with macro lenses.

-gl

Well, again it is an aesthetics thing... I use to set up my 4x5 with swings and tilts to get 'infinite' depth of field, which for 'moving pictures' would require a split diopter attachment.

In the 'wedding' biz the Wife would have me do the table shots with the Hasselblad, and again I usually setup with a place setting in the forground, sharp, and with small enough aperture, get at least most of the table 'sharp', while focus falloff would extend out to the rest of the tables. (Since I was not shooting 4x5 I could not do tricks with swings and tilts to get 'infinite' DoF...).

Very few occasions did I shoot the shallow DoF, unless the background was truly ugly.

Since I was shooting the Wedding biz shots with the Hasselblad I had to accept parallel line whackness because I could adjust lens and film plane relationships.

[brynsank]

I haven't read through all the replies so apologies if I'm repeating someone else - given a choice, I would absolutely steer away from a Canon DSLR for landscape/architecture. Landscapes and building exteriors are full of fine, straight lines which wreak havoc in terms of moire and aliasing. Probably a GH2 would be a better bet on a skeleton budget, of course a C300 or the like would be a more ideal choice if you've a bit more $ to play with.

As a side note, if you are shooting on a Canon DSLR then I find the notion of L-series lenses being "too soft" to be rather absurd. The picture out of a 5DIII will be soft no matter what lens you put on it, and the sharper the glass, the more likely you are to have issues with moire/aliasing.