Six Buildings in One Day

All of me weekend plans went out the window, completely.....

Last week, a client and colleague, Lauren Knuffke, reached out and asked if I'd be interested in meeting the CEO of her company to talk about possible work on their projects. Up to this point, I had only done event photography with Lauren through the SMPS of San Antonio. I do event photography for some extra income, but mostly to create connections and network. This was a connection that looked like it could blossom.

Lauren is the Business Development Director at Sharp Glass in San Antonio. Sharp Glass is a glazing contractor committed to the quality fabrication and installation of glass, aluminum and specialty products for commercial and industrial applications. I reviewed their website and their project photos made an immediate impression. That impression was: I can do so much better than these!

Not to hate on their photographer. Architecture photography is one of the most difficult niches to master, IMHO. As a professional in this niche, I could immediate point out the things I felt were "wrong" in these photos.

Wanting to make a great impression, I set out to photograph some of the local projects in San Antonio. The only problem was, I literally had one day to get everything in. Being that the best lighting is around sunrise or sunset, the time frame to accomplish this was ridiculously short.

I set out to photograph on a Friday evening, about an hour before sunset. But, I ran into a problem that happens a lot in my industry: overzealous security guards.

I was trying to photograph the Thompson Hotel and the best view is from being the Tobin Center. Apparently, they have an outdoor movie every second Friday of the month and Friday was one of those nights. The main security guard had no issues as long as I was respectful to the patrons. But there's always one that likes to show his power. So I got the Hakeem Olajuwon block on this night.

But things always happen for a reason.

With only a small window of daylight left, I drove over to find a view of the Frost Tower and was able to nail this shot:

Everything else had to wait for this next morning.

Luckily, Saturday morning had a slight overcast. Because of this fortunate event, I was able to photography five buildings more buildings: Thompson Hotel, Hotel Emma, Historic Pearl, Credit Human Building, Witte Museum.

I'll be writing blog posts on each of these buildings to show how I photograph and edited each. For now, enjoy the final results: