Shooting architecture with a wide angle lens is harder than it looks. Converging verticals, contrast extremes, and the question of what clients actually want from your images all collide in ways that catch a lot of people off guard.
Coming to you from Keith Cooper, this detailed walkthrough takes you through a substantial collection of architectural images Cooper shot while testing the Sigma 12-24mm f/4 on a Canon 5DS, a 50-megapixel body that gives enough resolution to correct and crop without sacrificing usable output. Cooper is direct about the tradeoffs of using a standard wide angle lens versus a tilt-shift: the lens is faster to work with, but you're not seeing the final composition in the viewfinder the way you would with shift. Most of the images were shot handheld using the camera's built-in level, primarily at the 12mm end of the zoom range. That choice alone says something about where the real utility of this focal length lives. Cooper has also shot with the Fuji GFX 100S and used a Canon TS-E 17mm shift lens for comparison work at locations like Wells Cathedral, so his perspective on what each tool actually delivers is grounded in direct experience.
One of the more practically useful threads running through the video is how Cooper thinks about who the images are for. Architects want buildings to look like their drawings. Marketing departments want dynamic angles. Those two groups often have opposite reactions to the same photograph. Cooper shoots a mix on most jobs specifically because he has learned, through experience, that the images he personally finds most interesting are not always the ones that end up getting used. He also walks through the timing question for dusk and blue-hour shooting with real specificity, including a concrete example of a current job he's planning around shop hours, seasonal light, and the fact that Christmas decorations will rule out certain months entirely. The leaf-drop window in late autumn, the problem of LED light trails producing dotted lines instead of clean streaks, sun stars from five-blade apertures becoming distracting rather than atmospheric — these are the kinds of details that don't show up in most lens review videos.
Cooper also addresses something that gets glossed over in a lot of architecture content: sun stars. A lens with a five-blade aperture produces sharp, prominent ones. That sounds appealing until you've shown enough images to enough people and noticed that the stars start drawing attention away from the building itself. His preference, stated plainly, is a lens that doesn't produce heavy sun stars, and he explains exactly why. The video also gets into interior shooting, stairwells, low-light balancing, and how he handles people in frame, treating them compositionally rather than as subjects. He's candid that this is precisely why he doesn't shoot weddings or portraits.
The video covers a lot of ground, but some of the most useful material, including how Cooper handles geometric correction using DxO ViewPoint, his approach to bracketing shots with moving traffic, and specific composition decisions he made on individual images, is best seen alongside the actual images he's walking through. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Cooper.
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