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.

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.

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.

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.

The office building at 31 Europa Square at L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, designed by architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta is a recycled steel low height block with a visible structure unfolded like a powerful ribs curtain that firmly supports the building and smoothly allows light and air to penetrate it.

I planned the building exterior photographs to first communicate its kind presence on its site, then capturing the apparently tense dialogue between the project and the rest of the buildings in Europa Square and, surely and above all, to catch the complex richness of color and texture of the steel structure.

I decided to use the last afternoon lights of the setting winter sun and the diffuse light after sunset to communicate the ideas I had in mind: using this light I managed to simplify the building volumetry -I ran the obvious risk of making it too dense …- lightening its presence on my frames eliminating any deep shadows or violent highlights, and expanding the color range of the metal in both the steel skin of the project and the huge glass facades of the neighboring buildings. … Read more …