The sun not always shines on an infinite blue sky with the clean precise clarity that a naive architectural photographer would dream to control.

While it is true that it is always fair weather in architectural photography, so is that this statement is not completely accurate because it can happen sometimes that a huge variety of clouds of different shapes, sizes and many diverse densities will wander around the sky to the point of completely hiding sunlight.

It depends on the diffuse quality of light from the overcast sky and the way it illuminates the frame to creatively use it to highlight the elements that the image is depicting.

In the case of the photograph of the new structures of the old Barcelona Las Arenas bullring I shot for the office of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners in London, I took advantage of several cloudy days to raise a number of images in wich any dense shadows would subtract to the flat colors of the new elements of the bullring the saturation and brightness that I needed to represent them.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to shooting on an overcast day is controlling the possibly too heavy proportion of clouds in the frame.

Although, with a little patience, the sun always rises in the sky.

The new Barcelona Telefónica headquarters building designed by architect Enric Massip is a 110 meters tall tower rising from the very beginning of Diagonal Avenue as a delicate curtain wall supported by a light white steel mesh growing from the pavement to complete and decidedly dominate the surrounding urban landscape.

The presence of Diagonal Zero Zero tower in Barcelona Fòrum area and the visual power of its white sunlit color determine the choice of very specific hours in which to photograph it to carefully control the shadows projected by neighboring buildings and to select, above all, a contrast ratio to preserve the detailed drawing of the white façades silhouetted against the dense blue sky.

Sunlight is clean and exact and always lights up the frame with precise direction and contrast: in architectural photography is always the sun who says the last word.

The representation of an elevation view has meant since architectural photography exists a way to truthfully document the exact proportions of a building and accurately capture the detail of its parts.

Under this approach, elevation shots appear as frames in which the vanishing point of the image is placed in the center of the photographed structure and a flat lighting is used to reduce the depth of the shadows with the intention of recovering the linearity and two-dimensionality of an architectural drawing.

While it is true that an elevation shot can successfully document the information reflected in a drawing, when in the process of photographically interpreting a project I use elevations to focus attention on some elements that I want to highlight in my frame to graphically simplify its appearance -no matter if they are lines, shapes, colors or textures-, and to abstract them.

Probably it ends up that framing an elevation shot becomes very intuitive because the elements in the image are harmoniously arranged into the camera viewfinder very quickly and naturally. That’s why I know that if it takes me so much longer than usual to create a frame … something is not working and I will finish rejecting that picture.

It took me very little time to solve the elevations in the photographs of Josep Llobet projects that you can see here.