Location shooting where I live (Burbank, California) is at a premium. Many places nearby like local businesses and public venues can be used for shooting scenes, but that unknown location is also great to discover. Many obvious choices can work against new productions because they are too expensive or difficult to obtain on short notice. Images of available or accessible locations for various interior and extior scenes are a microstock market all its own.
As with many walkabout photo grabs, I worked first get real clarity and shots of my subject material. In the editing session I noticed that the resolution was so high on a lot of my museum shots they were almost too difficult to examine for uniform tones and deep and near/far crispness. But cropping the sides of the shot generated a lot more visual drama inside the frame. The “forced” intersection of the vertices of the vaulted “flying buttresses” to the near wall created a perspective repetition of the arched “tunnel”. Certainly the word “cathedral” came to mind many times. But the image files allowed me to convey the excitement the grandeur of the structure created in me.
Working in lower light can be an opportunity in disguise. Recently the assignments took me to downtown Los Angeles on day which seemed topsy turvy with clouds and less than golden sunlight. Given that a lot of the photography was going to take place in deep urban canyons, this didn’t body well for shots without that morose gray tone that robs many images of otherwise great potential.