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.

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 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 first thing that called my attention when looking at Barcelona Rosselló Street Emma Room Mate Hotel by architects Yolanda Nadal and Luís Moneo were the many white lit pieces distributed on its façade rectangular surface and how these pieces were dissolved by the surrounding urban landscape.

The hotel façade is intentionally lightweight because of the pieces apparent motion as seen from Enric Granados Street on the left side of the building and compact when looking at the very same lit rectangles as seen coming from the right from Balmes Street.

I was specially concerned in preserving the subtle connection between the white texture inside the lit pieces in the night façade and the detail in the huge black area in wich the white rectangles are rhythmically arranged: although exposure and contrast were difficult to control, losing detail in both blacks and whites would have meant a quite unpleasant look in my photographs far from what I saw and felt when I first noticed the hotel delicate urban presence.