Barcelona Open House has included among the projects that will be visited in its 2011 edition the two 34 Carme and 66 Sant Pere més Alt streets rehabilitation projects that I have photographed for his authors, architects Agustí Costa and Josep Llobet.

Both projects are interventions that raise from a particularly uninhibited dialogue with the preexisting dwellings to propose new and imaginative solutions in domestic space.

Carme and Sant Pere més Alt projects can be visited on October 22 and 23: you can read more details on the organization website.

Barcelona Open House is part of Open House World Wide and is one of the cities like London, New York, Chicago, Rome and Helsinki promoting through this initiative architecture as a cultural value to learn in a social and interactive way to improve  debate and exchange of points of view and the collective identity of the inhabitants of the cities.

I have recently added some new pieces to my photo equipment that I think they will decisively transform my workflow to make it much more productive and efficient. There are two that I specially think they are now essential and among the most profitable investments an architectural photographer can ever make.

They are Sun Seeker and Light Trac, two small smartphone apps that provide with complete accuracy the position, height and path of the sun in a particular location for any time and day of the year.

These applications have comprehensive tables with sunrise and sunset times, sun’s maximum elevation and even also the length of the shadows cast by sunlight. Most of the information is displayed on satellite photographs -and in the case of Sun Seeker also in a 3D view- on wich small arrows precisely mark the phases of the sun path throughout the day.

Of course, a long experience as a photographer and a patient observation of the sun in a location will let you know by using a compass how the project you are going to photograph will look illuminated by sunlight -for one thing is certain, and that is that the sun always rises in the east and invariably sets in the west-.

But I think it’s fair to say that not always an architectural photographer succeeds in how accurate he needs his predictions to be and that any help that simplifies and improves his process of making creative decisions on the photographic representation of the project in a more efficient way is quite a good and necessary help.