I feel very happy to increasingly see my photographs published in many magazines digital editions that are now showing their contents through reading applications for iPad, tablets and smartphones.

The two last I have found are two Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Alonso, Balaguer y Arquitectos Asociados Barcelona Las Arenas renovation project photographs -one of them in a beautifully saturated double page- appearing in an article by Jeff L. Brown for the January 2012 Civil Engineering issue, the journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

I do find it very gratifying to see that my images work so well in such reader interactive applications, quite interesting and fast growing apps -so fast that one of these applications actually advertises itself as “the world’s largest newsstand” … – and knowing that a reference magazine for a highly specialized professional field such as American engineering is giving that much relevance to my photographs.

All Barcelona Las Arenas photographs were made in order to serve both the project editorial communication as well as the two architectural firms that created and developed the project corporate communication.

Las Arenas renovation has been shortlisted among the finalists for the 2012 Civic Trust Awards to be awarded next March 2nd in Edinburgh. Much of the project presentation is based on my photographs and I very much hope that both the project and my photos can gain the recognition of such an important British professional organization.

Diagonal Zero Zero tower powerfully strucks me because of the elegant way the building faces its surrounding urban landscape and the way her skin purely white crosses the blue saturated sky in all its glory.

My photographs of this project interpret it according to the idea of representing the kind presence of a fascinating white sculpture that extraordinarily rises above the city that decidedly deserves to be contemplated with great tranquility and attention.

It is because of the combination of this strong and yet beautifully suggestive presence of Diagonal Zero Zero that I have decided to use a photograph of this project -the only photograph in wich the tower faces the clouds of a clearing storm- as the background of my greeting card for 2012.

Let me please wish you all the best for next year 2012. I do hope to see you here again very soon: Happy New Year.

I do not think to be mistaken if I say that I learned the technique and developed my vision to be an architectural photographer by carrying a large format camera and shooting black and white film.

Of all the films I remember using, I specially remember Kodak Tmax 100 sheet film and the incredibly fabulous Polaroid Type 55 film … It’s been a long time since then and I do surely know now that I did not express myself through black and white images again because I was not able to find a professional application where to fit them and because no digital process could persaude me of evoking the strong presence of the properly exposed and processed silver emulsion.

It was not until I began using Nik Software Silver Efex Pro 2 when I finally discovered that I could feel comfortable again exploring new black and white frames and capturing the energy of the organic simplicity of the picture elements that I constantly seek.

The Berga, Barcelona, Vilà House photographs for architect Agustí Costa gave me the opportunity to add a new meaning to my assignment color images by learning from his comments about how he was inspired by Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in generating his own project.

I had recently seen Julius Shulman’s Kaufmann House photographs for Richard Neutra and I thought It was the time for me to propose some Vilà House black and white pictures just to experiment and see what happened.

And I could not be happier with the results. Working in black and white has nothing to do with nostalgia: it is pure simplicity and power condensed.

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.

I have just realized that it’s twenty years now that I am an architectural photographer.

The truth is that there are still many projects to shoot in the next twenty or thirty years and that I can’t now imagine how these projects will look like or how will I photograph them and, even less, imagine the new cameras and techniques that I will use to represent them.

For one thing I am sure and that is that photographing architecture will always continue being a fun and interesting job only if I strive to keep my eyes alert, attentive and, above all, curious.

Just like every day for twenty years now.

The office of Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners has commissioned me to take some photographs of his conversion project of former Barcelona Las Arenas bullring into an entertainment and leisure complex.

The space has been projected to become a new landmark and a monumental entrance to the city that has as main feature a dome that crowns the building as a new public square suspended in the air that is supported by the powerful orange brick mass enhanced and carefully preserved from the old historic building.

My pictures had to represent as essential requirements by the project architects in London both the decided presence of the building in its urban setting and the new and prominent floating square over the city.

Being obvious that any point of view from street level interpreted the ideas that I had to represent with very little resolution and that they could even get dissolved, it became necessary to locate some vantage points in Plaza de España and Tarragona street from where to work and graphically inscribe the large bullring oval dome on the dense and ordered urban fabric of the Barcelona Eixample limits.

Similarly, it was also vital for the graphic treatment of the images the choice of a more vivid contrast and saturation in my photographs in order to highlight the particular use of color in Las Arenas project as is characteristic and distinctive in the work of Richard Rogers.

You can see more Las Arenas photographs in the Specials section in the Gallery of the site.

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.