Photographing roofs in difficult weather conditions

Buildings tend to look best when photographed in sunlight. If my client wants a daylight shot then I always try and schedule the shoot on a day when the weather and direction of daylight shows the building off at its best. Often this will mean rescheduling and sometimes the right forecastable weather window may take a few weeks to arrive. The worst jobs are those that have to be photographed at a specific time on a specific day, usually due to client’s access and deadline issues. Harrow School roof was one such job, when the specified day in March came round the weather was terrible, very windy, very overcast and zero degrees centigrade the last kind of day you would normally pick to capture this location.

Without direct sunlight the roofs looked really dull and flat and the sky’s easy to overexpose. I thought the only way forward was to produce the final images in Monochrome and I would resort to HDR photographs in tricky conditions like this but the HDR process always seems to highlight imperfections in metal work particularly in Black and White and so these shots are made up of one exposure for the sky and one for the roof manually layered together and then processed in Black and White. While the weather was terrible it turned out to be an enjoyable day, the client was very happy with the results and the building surveyor in me really appreciated the fantastic workmanship and detailing of the roof.