Andy McDonald Black and White Photos

The Building Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and opened in 2011, this purpose built museum sits at the confluence of the River Kelvin and the Clyde. It is a sectional extrusion open at both ends, its outline encapsulating a wave or pleat, flows from the city to waterfront, symbolizing the dynamic relationship between Glasgow and the ship-building, seafaring and industrial legacy of the river Clyde. Clear glass facades allow light to flood through the main exhibition space. The Riverside Museum won the 2013 European Museum of the Year award. The Photograph The regeneration of the docks along the Clyde has resulted in some very impressive architecture, which I have been gradually featuring here on my website. We took the Subway from the city centre to Govan and crossed the Clyde via the newly opened Govan-Partick bridge (which will likely feature here at some point). The part of the museum facing the Clyde was obscured by building work when we visited, so I made sure that we took the t...

The Building The Advanced Research Centre (ARC) building is one of the many standout buildings on the University of Glasgow campus in the West End of the city. The building opened in 2022 and was designed by HOK Architects. HOK’s design expresses the research activities taking place inside the ARC while drawing inspiration from the University’s existing campus and masterplan and Glasgow’s historic buildings. The Photograph This is a building that I have photographed on all of the trips that I have made to Glasgow since the initial open day visit in June 2023. It is a very large building with lots of interesting shapes, which actually makes it quite difficult to capture. Both of the pictures I have (so far) published have been abstracts, concentrating on smaller parts of the building.  For this one, I was struck by the walkway with its sweeping curves and how the light hits the exterior.  This is a panoramic photograph made up of two images shot on the Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Shi...

  The Building The ASI was designed and built by GF Tomlinson and opened in 2024, as part of an expansion plan by Lincoln College to provide training to young adults for various roles within the aviation and space industries. It is a three storey building that accommodates a full-sized Airbus A318 for hands-on teaching experience. The initial brief was for just a section of the fuselage to be placed in the building, but through collaborative innovation it was possible to install the whole unit, enhancing the learning experience for the students. The Photograph I was in Newark for a couple of hours and took the opportunity to get some pictures. My plan was to photograph Castle House, the new ASI building and the Palace Theatre. Castle House was fenced off because the paving slabs in front had been lifted, whilst the Palace Theatre was surrounded by young children so in the end my only option was this building. I was testing out my new Leofoto G2 Geared Head, so for once I was shooti...

  The Building I was walking around Edinburgh during a short visit and I found myself at the University campus on Bristo Square. I'm not actually sure what this building is, it is very close to McEwan Hall so might be an extension of it. The circular building is a mixture of glazing and metal cladding which gives it quite an interesting look. The Photograph This building immediately jumped out at me as I was wandering around the square. I particularly liked how the steps led to it, and the way the building was shaped to deal with the split levels. To get a decent amount of steps to feature I shot two images using the shift lens to bring in more of the foreground. Processing was reasonably straightforward on this one, the most time consuming part was making a selection around all of the fins of the cladding to allow me to separate them from the black sky I planned.  I deliberately chose to leave quite a lot of detail on the steps and added the light portion to the windows to gi...

  The Building Originally built in 1958, this imposing office tower block was recommended for demolition. Instead, FW Properties purchased the building and worked with 5th Studio Architects (of Cambridge) to renovate and repurpose it into luxury apartments. As the RIBA judges explain in their citation "the building's height was increased by three storeys producing a more appealing and slender silhouette. This, together with new cladding, means that the development now provides a landmark for the city rather than the eyesore that the unused tower became." The Photograph When I first noticed this building I could see that it had a lot of potential. I particularly liked that the shop unit at ground level provided a good "base" to the image and sets some context for the building. I shot this using the Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Shift lens with a reasonable amount of vertical shift. In Photoshop it was quite a big job to select all of the individual parts of the cladding witho...

  The Building Built in 2011 and designed by Piers Gough from CZWG this unique building is nestled among trees in the City Hospital grounds in Nottingham. This is one of a number of Maggie's centres around the world, all designed to be bright and uplifting spaces for cancer patients undergoing treatment.  The Nottingham centre appears to float among the trees and its sense of symmetry and shape create a sense of space and balance. The Photograph I had an hour or so after parking up at the hospital and wanted to try for a picture of the Roman Catholic church in Arnold (more on that in a later article I hope). As I headed across the hospital grounds I spotted this highly unusual building nestled in the trees and knew it would make an interesting subject. The best angle was from the road running alongside which goes up something of an incline, so I shot this from a lower viewpoint giving the building more prominence in the frame. I needed to use the shift mechanism on the lens to...

Selecting individual parts of an image is a key skill required for creating fine art architecture images.  Previously, I have shown why I make my selections manually ( EDITING - Why I make my own selections in Photoshop ). In this post I will explain how I use the Pen tool to make my selections. Learning the pen tool in Photoshop has been one of the hardest things I have done, but also one of the most worthwhile. Before using the Pen tool I made most of my selections using the Polygonal Lasso tool, but my friend Jon Knight suggested that I would benefit from learning how to use the Pen tool instead. At its most basic level, the pen tool allows you to create a path in your image, for selections this is a closed path - i.e. one that forms a 2 dimensional shape in your image. One of the immediate benefits is that the path can be edited after it has been drawn - adding, removing or moving points. Showing a simple straight line made by clicking two points with the pen tool If you just c...

The key part to editing fine art black & white architecture images is being able to selectively apply adjustments to different parts of the image. At the most basic level, this breaks down to foreground, subject and sky. Some images are slightly more complex and might need left and right background selections as well. Also, there are likely to be many, many more selections required on the main subject. The quality of the selections you make will directly impact the quality of your final image, and the time it will take you to prepare the image. In my experience "sloppy" selections end up costing inordinate amounts of time tidying up the image (with clone stamp etc.) and is very prone to errors (e.g. missing imperfections that show on the final print or projected image). Whereas, spending time getting the best possible selections at the beginning of the editing process will save you from lots of rework at the end. Photoshop (PS) offers some excellent selection/masking too...

The Building Opened in 2001, the Forum was commissioned to replace the library which was sadly destroyed in a fire. Hopkin Architects redesigned the old library site along with an adjacent car park to form a complete city block for the building’s combined mixed uses. These include library and archive services, local visitor and business centres, a heritage exhibition, retail, bar and restaurant facilities, and the regional BBC centre for television and radio. Commercial office space occupies one third of the building, generating further income, as does a new underground car park. Constructed in loadbearing brickwork, the Forum creates a sense of civic gravitas. The three-storey building shelters a horseshoe-shaped enclosure housing a new public space. The semi-circular end encloses the library and provides it with a continuous elevation to the west, while the eastern end opens to the city through a spectacular glazed wall, framing the Gothic church tower of St Peter Mancroft. Withi...

  I travelled over to a small village just outside of Lincoln yesterday to give an in-person presentation of my talk "Into Darkness" to an enthusiastic group of black and white photographers based in Lincolnshire. My talk is a mixture of prints and projected images, explaining my journey from straightforward black and white photography into fine art black and white architecture photography. The talk features my successful ARPS Visual Arts panel but many more pictures of buildings, mainly from within the UK. I also share some before and after images to describe how I approach the subjects and what I am hoping to achieve with them. I also spend some time demonstrating the techniques I use when editing, and some tips for shooting this type of subject.  I'm happy to come out to talk to any other clubs within reasonable travelling distance from NG13 but I am also putting together a digital only version of my talk to present over Zoom for more distant clubs. See more of my work...

  The Building This is the "new" Police Station at Wick, Caithness which was opened in 2003. It is often difficult researching this type of everyday building for information about its design etc. and this was particularly the case for this one. The one thing I could glean from the Internet was that it was likely constructed by DM Geddes and Sons, Limited who sadly seem to no longer be in business. In desperation, I turned to AI using Bing and asked it who designed this building. For once, the AI admitted that it had no idea (I have had instances in the past where it just randomly picked a famous architect and said the building was their design, when it very obviously wasn't). However, it did suggest ways that I could dig deeper, including searching the planning archives of Highland Council. So, I did search the planning archives and based on that I believe that it was designed by Donald Mackillop Associates, Dingwall as they were the agents on the planning application and...