6374 - Modern Vienna III


You can’t take a wide-angle image of a mirror-clad building without distracting reflections. Here the problem was two-fold:

The colors of the neighboring buildings clashed with the color of glass and sky. It completely distracted from the shape of the office building.

The other thing is, that these reflective windows have a certain thickness. Vertically, along “meridians”, if I may borrow this term, they are aligned in a plane. Note though, that my angle of view through the glass depends on the height of the individual pane.

Imagine a ray cast from the camera to a lower pane. It does not cut through the pane at a right angle, but let’s assume it is 80 degrees. When it enters the glass, it runs through the glass for a certain length, slightly longer then the thickness of the glass.

The ray through a window at the top will enter at a much smaller angle, and its way through the glass will be longer.

Now two things happen: glass has a color, and the longer the ray’s way through the glass, the more it is tinted by the glass. On the other hand, there is the independent effect of more reflections with smaller angles. The latter is also moderated by the reflectiveness of the glass.

These two effects cancel each other. In the lower parts, the color change in the glass is dominant, but the higher you get, the more the reflected sky begins to dominate. The net effect is, that the color of the glass seems to change with height.

And here you have them, my reasons for going black and white.

In other images, without reflections of other buildings, I usually go the route of linear gradients with shifts of color temperature and contrast. It’s wrong, but it looks right. In this case I happily went black and white 😁