In this post, I write about the first time for me with architectural photography in Riga, Latvia. This is the second part of my posts about photographing for my Estonian client SBM Fastwood. The first post was about Citizen’s Balcony of the Helsinki Central Library Oodi in Helsinki, Finland, designed by ALA Architects.
Marco from Fastwood contacted me in July 2020 and offered an interesting photography assignment, this time in Riga, Latvia. He needed photographs of the new office building, Mežaparka birojs. We agreed to photograph in August when the weather was sunny enough. Right after the phone call I checked out the plane ticket prices. For my surprise, it costed a lot less to have a return flight after two days than the flight on the same or the next day. I made a quick decision to purchase the cheaper tickets and to stay two nights in Riga. Half a day working and the rest on vacation in a beautiful city of Riga? Sounds good, right?
In 2020, Covid-19 had an effect on travelling and it was mandatory to wear a mask during the whole flight with Finnair. The Finnish airports only recommended the mask. It is noteworthy that I saw only two people wearing masks in Riga during the three-day visit. Face masks were a whole lot more common sight in Helsinki those days.
What is Mežaparka birojs?
Mežaparka birojs is located in Mežaparks (forest park in English) neighbourhoods. Mežaparks stands out as one of Riga’s most luxurious and verdant neighborhoods, blending high-end living with a top-tier recreational green space. Mežaparka birojs is a new Class A office building, built on the principles of sustainable construction by Citrus Solutions. The architectural designer of the building is Gatis Didrihsons from Didrihsons architects and the interior designer is Eva Staņeviča. Both designers have done an excellent job! The developer is SIA DOMUSS.
The sustainable cladding of the nice looking façade is Accoya wood, sold by my client SBM Fastwood. If you’re interested in Accoya, go ahead and check out my previous post, Citizen’s Balcony. You can read more very interesting details of this project on the Accoya site.
At the location
After arriving in Riga, I left the non-photography stuff to my hotel and traveled early to the photo location with tram. I walked to the front of the building, set up the tripod and camera. Only after couple of minutes the security guard arrived and asked me questions in Latvian which I don’t speak. He was an old man and didn’t speak English. But soon enough we found a language we both understood: German. He asked my “Ausweis”, which means an ID card. He gave a look at my passport, gave it back to me and returned to his position inside the office building. In Latvia, many older people speak Latvian, Russian and German, and younger people speak mostly Latvian and English.
After my client Marco arrived, we discussed for a while and I started to photograph the building. I started to walk around the building with my camera and take pictures. The building gave me lots of nice opportunities for great images.
I used my Canon EOS 5D Mark III with Canon EF 16-35mm f/4 L IS USM, EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro and EF 70-200mm f/4 L IS USM lenses. As you can guess, most of the photos were taken with the versatile 16-35mm.
The light changed a lot during the photo shoot, from low-contrast look with soft shadows to more intense colors with stronger shadows. At first the sky was overcast but fortunately the low-level clouds started to clear up. In the end of the photography, the sky was covered almost entirely with nice high-level Cirrus clouds which look much better in architectural photographs than low-level Cumulus clouds.
I think it was a good thing that there were some clouds to diffuse strong sunlight.
All in all, everything went well and my client was happy with the results. And so was I. It was raining the next day so we were really lucky!
More architectural photography in Riga
Even though I was on a vacation after photographing the Mežaparka birojs, I did some more architectural photography in Riga for my own archives. I will write about that soon. Stay tuned!