This is the Music City Center in Nashville…and the image that started it all. Prior to taking this image a few years ago, I had been doing mostly real estate shoots, but I was ready to make the move to commercial interior and architecture photography. That’s not exactly an easy jump to make, but I felt it was a necessary one to progress in my career.

While there are many similarities between architecture and real estate work, there are also a number of differences. Yeah, sure, you’re still photographing buildings and interiors, but the way you show them is totally different.

With real estate, outside of the super high-end, the name of the game is typically “wide and bright.” Meaning, light the ever-living shit out of the house and zoom out on the lens as far as that fucker will go. Take 25, 35, or even 50 photos in an hour or two and move on to the next 2 or 3 jobs you have that day. There’s no time for serious staging. Shoot and move, baby.

Architecture, on the other hand, is all about getting the right shot at the right time with the right light. Of course, that’s after putting in an excruciating amount of effort to stage and set the shot beforehand. Spend an hour or two watching your photographer move furniture and agonize over the placement of a coffee table book or lamp, you know you’re at an architecture or interior design shoot.

The photo count also drops pretty drastically on a commercial shoot. I may deliver 10-15 images on an architecture project because it’s tough to deliver a high image count when setting up a shot can take 30 minutes to an hour or more. That makes 10 or 12 hour days more normal than uncommon.

All of that to say this; this was the image that, in a way, proved to a new clientele that I had the ability and skill set to shoot architecture

About the Image Itself

I took this image around 3 years ago. I had seen a similar image before, but I wanted to do it a little differently and put my own mark on it. Luckily for me, everything lined up exactly like it needed to.

I made my way to the parking deck where I had previously scouted and waited for the right moment. Twilight images take a while. You have to find the spot to take the hero image, then snap images from about 20 minutes before sunset until 20 minutes after sunset. All together, it generally takes a couple of hours on location to pull off a shot like this.

It’s also worth noting the extreme difficulty of capturing an image like this in one exposure. There are simply too many moving parts. People, cars, scooters and other objects are constantly moving through the frame and some additional exposures are needed to add/remove those elements. The proper exposure for the sky usually comes a little bit before the proper exposure for the architecture itself and they may have to be combined.

The great thing about this image is that, what you see here, is 100% of what I saw that day at the Music City Center. The sky was natural. It wasn’t replaced with something more dramatic. The people are the real people that were walking up and down the sidewalk. There were no additional lights added. What you see is great architecture combined with great natural lighting and an amazing sunset.