Large Format Photography Australia

It was back in about 1987. The architect client had insisted that I take out extra Insurance cover for them to bring this detailed model of the proposed development of a project known as 400 George Street to the studio. It was, in fact, a project that started at number 400 George Street and in fact extended right along a full block of King Street to Pitt Street Mall. The model included interior lighting in part and had cost $27,000 — a hefty sum at any time but especially in 1987. It was brought in sections, which then had to be screwed together, to the studio . The architect's courier dropped the tower block and broke it. Phew!! The claim was on their insurance and not mine.



The site plan included in an atrium arcade built as the quadrant of an arc skirting a heritage listed building at the corner of Pitt & King. About where the shops at the right are a paparazzi mate of mine, David Morgan, got a shot at Pope John Paul II in the PopeMobile driving past the colourful of "Condom Kingdom".



And here is a concurrent day overhead of the atrium from Google maps:

How things have changed.
Walter you worked hard to make a photograph of a model look like a photograph of a building.
Nowadays I see the opposite from art photographers discovering their fancy new tilt shift lens can do reverse Scheimpflug. Cityscapes with a narrow zone of focus across the middle, blurry top and bottom, can be made to look like table-top models. Here's a well watermarked example:
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/tilt-sh ... 930736.jpg

Thanks for the giggle Maris,

With the commercial insistance on the expedience of digital I lived with a shoulder buckling under the burden of a bag full of tilt/shifts and would recite 2 of my mantras to anybody with ears to hear, "a tilt/shift does not a view camera make", and "Fine Art is 'art' with a capital 'F'". The seemingly toy cityscape seems a lost opportunity to me. A nice idea stubbing its toe on the irrelevance of the placement of the plane of focus. An absence of visible motivation. Or am I missing something?

Those shots seem so skilful to me, Walter, as Maris said, you've made models look like full sized buildings, no doubt.

Regarding the tilt shift lenses, I've been thinking about one for architectural work, and possibly a bit of landscape action too. I'd be keen to hear the limitations that you ran into with them, I suppose beyond the older versions having tilt and shift axes locked in relation to each other?