On Sunday thanks to Goodman’s business park’s I had the chance to have a crash course in architectural photography.  Over the last year or so I have been trying to improve my photography, and recently have started shooting most of my photographs in manual mode without really knowing what I was doing other than trial and error alongside a lot of guess work.

Under the tuition of the lovely Simon from Birmingham based Iguana Photography we firstly visited the floozy in the jacuzzi and took photos of the fantastic Birmingham Town Hall. Simon explained some of the best angles to look at the building from and some of the best angles to take photos from, and let us loose to see what we could achieve ourselves.

As you can see it took me a while to get the settings on my Panasonic Lumix LZ20 just right, but I am quite proud of the bottom one.

We then made our way to the Birmingham Central Library which in contrast to the Town Hall’s traditional architecture has recently been refurbished and has a thoroughly modern look.

I really like the contrast of the old and new buildings in the bottom 2 photos.

After about 40 minutes of photographing the Central library we headed to Jamies Italian for lunch, where Simon explained in more detail about F stop numbers and shutter speed.

After lunch we headed over to the iconic Selfridges building at The Bullring Birmingham. Where simon talked us through taking photos of the lines of the building and getting right up close to the details.

We were really lucky that the weather on the day was just right to capture the colours of the sky in contrast to the building so beautifully, especially with the clouds in the background.

It was almost time for the tour to end but not before we headed to the entrance of the bullring shopping centre to take a few more photos to practice taking photos where there might be a lot of foot fall whilst needing to photograph a building.

The Hollister building was very aesthetically pleasing to the eye, whilst the rotunda apartment building added a little bit of the traditional Bullring to the modern bullring.

I was quite pleased with how much more confidence I gained in using the manual setting on my camera in such a short space of time, Simon had a lot of patience and didn’t mind explaining things 2 or 3 times.

I personally cant wait to practice my new found confidence a lot more and hopefully i won’t be switching to intelligent auto quite so often.

Disclosure: I received lunch at Jamies Italian and the photography tuition F.O.C in exchange for writing a blog post about my day. All words and photographs are my own.