An occasional blog, with photos. Thanks for looking.
Big buildings in the big city
Photographing large buildings located in busy CBD areas can be a challenge. I am reasonably happy with these images of 70 Franklin Street and the Quest Apartments designed by Cheesman Architects for Adelaide's Kyren Group.
A Visit to Prison
We came away with some interesting images from a visit to a large SA prison to photograph the interiors of a new building and a renovated kitchen for Grieve Gillett. The talented Victoria Berekmeri was assisting me on the day and took the last two of the following photographs. (I'm responsible for the heavy handed editing.) A version of first photograph helped me win the Architecture Photographer of Year Award at the SA Professional Photography Awards in July.
Goolwa Beach House a delight to photograph
The Goolwa House by Grieve Gillett is located up against the sandhill system that backs the magnificent Goolwa beach - and this provided some challenges and some opportunities in our efforts to not only show how well designed and crafted this building is, but also how beautifully it sits in its environment. The photography was commissioned for a submission to the 2013 SA Architecture Awards. The architects won the Sustainable Architecture Award and a Residential Architecture Commendation.
This photograph was used as the poster for the Awards presentation.
A long lens used from the top of the adjacent sandhills allowed me to show the house's relationship with the nearby River Murray and Hindmarsh Island.
The use of wood inside and outside this house is a stand-out feature.
Steve Grieve, the architect who commissioned the photography, particularly liked this photograph. "A triumph" he called it.
And this is my favourite from the shoot, again with a long lens from a fair distance, which allowed description of the location of the house, but it is the play of light and dark tones I really like in this.
Adelaide architecture - 400 King William Street
400 King William Street is one of my favourite Adelaide buildings. Designed by South Australian architectural practice Cheesman Architects, it is a great glass rectangular cube that changes dramatically as the sky changes, so it's always worth a look to see what is playing on the pure form of the building when you pass by. And it was a real pleasure to be commissioned late last year to photograph it inside and out. The client was a German advertising agency working for the new owners, an investment fund management company.
My contact at the agency told me that the photographs were for a brochure, and generously offered to send me a copy. It arrived yesterday - 206 bound A4 pages, that's a book where I come from, I think something was lost in translation - and all but two of the photographs in it are mine. Now my German is far from flash, so please don't ask me what the book is about, but I do like the pictures!
Love a double page spread, especially when it's my photograph...
This was chosen as the hero shot of the building. I had taken it a couple of years ago for myself, and it won the job for me, popping up in the German agency's Google search on '400 King William Street'.
This shot from the roof ended up on the front cover. Good view of the Federal Court building from this angle and in this light.
I was asked to photograph some beautifully designed interiors.
The brief I was given called for 'images showing reflections of clouds on the building'. Clouds are fairly difficult to wrangle, so it took a few visits to get them lined up in the right place at the right time. The client liked this one.
My favourite photograph of Victoria Square is also in the book, taken in early 2010 when I had access to the top of ANZ House to photograph a water tank installation.
Helsinki interiors - and Alvar's door handle
This is part of a collection of black and white conversions of photographs I took in August while in Helsinki, Finland.
The Rotunda wing of the Finnish National Library, built 1902-1906, designed by architect and professor Gustaf Nyström.
The remarkable timber panelled lift lobby in the Porthania building, University of Helsinki, designed by Aarne Ervi, completed in 1957 and recently restored by Finnish architects NRT. The next two photographs are also from this beautiful example of Finnish modernism.
Town planner, architect, furniture and homeware designer Alvar Aalto has perhaps done most to put Finnish design on the map. The next three photos are from his famous Academic Bookshop (1962), right in the centre of Helsinki and still jam-packed with books and people buying them. The first shows the sky lights, supposedly referencing the shape of open books, which allow natural light to flood the whole building.
Relaxing in the Alvar Aalto Cafe, Level 2, Academic Bookshop. Hopefully this gives a bit of an idea of how those skylights make this interior such a delightful place to be.
Beauty and function combine in these door handles at the entrance to the Academic Bookshop - architecture for the high and the low...
Finally, the cafe at Finlandia Hall (Alvar Aalto, 1971). I want those chairs!