Shooting (and editing) the Desert X 2022 AlUla visitor center, architecture by KWY.studio

The first post... Not going to lie, while I've had the idea for this blog for years, getting a tiny bit of attention via my APAlmanac 'Project of the Year' contest entry getting on the shortlist inspired me to finally get the ball rolling. So, if you came here from APA, let me know!

It’s no exaggeration to say these were the most challenging photos I’ve made so far in my career. The visitor center was again designed by KWY.studio. It was photographed during the first two days of the public opening of the exhibition—the last two days we were in Saudi Arabia.

The challenge with this subject is finding the best time of day for each composition and then parking the camera on a tripod and watching people in the space while taking dozens of frames as they move about so I can ‘paint’ them in later in post. If I were to do this again, I would recruit someone to assist me with moving things around, asking people to hold a position, etc.

Composing for the interior was difficult—my 17mm lens wasn't quite wide enough to see the full oculus in one frame so I had to stitch several shots together in post to extend the frame to see the full opening. But because the floor of the building was wooden slats, there was movement between frames, making a tricky alignment in post. Also, the sun had the audacity to move during the shooting of these composites, so I also had to make sure shadows lined up in the different composite pieces.

Because the architects were unable to be on-site, they were not able to get the structure built exactly to their drawings, but they wanted the photos to reflect their vision. For me that meant drawing perspective lines (thanks architecture school!) & finding ways to modify the architecture in Photoshop. I built a crude SketchUp model of the building to make sure what I was doing was correct.

An walkthrough of one of the edits:

Other big challenges involved removing a ton of infrastructure around the building, particularly in the aerials (things invisible to guests), compositing the ‘entourage’ (people), and isolating the white paint of the architecture to tame the color casts.

I lucked out in 2020 with my visitor center photos… I had a lot of excellent ‘models’ as well as a few extra hands to style the scene. I like how these turned out, but it was a tremendous amount of effort to get there. I had to take a few months to be able to see these photos in a more objective light, which is why it took me so long to post them.

Update: My entry received an honorable mention! 🎉