I volunteer at a wildlife rehab, and my job on most releases is to wait. You sit with a bird until it decides the moment is right, and you get one good frame when it goes. A roof under Douglas firs asks for the same patience. The house next to mine in Gresham sits beneath three of them, and its north slope has not been dry since October. Every time I tried to photograph the moss from the yard I got a dark, flat rectangle that told a viewer nothing about how far it had spread or how the water was moving. Learning to shoot that roof took a whole…

I teach a beginner class in Madison, and every fall we photograph the same stretch of brick storefronts. The first year I scheduled it for a bright Saturday; the students came back with a lit plane, a black hole where a doorway was, and no way to explain what either proved. The second year it rained, we shot under the awnings, and nearly every frame was usable. That afternoon taught the class more about light than any lecture I give, and it is why I schedule exterior assignments for the grayest day I can find. Flat light is not the same as bad light Direct sun is one source from…

Most of my season is spent on trails, not on roofs, but trail work taught me to read a structure from where I can actually stand. Last fall I was in a driveway in Iowa City with a borrowed 400mm, looking at a two-story house whose roof I could not walk on and would not climb. From the far end of the yard the long lens pulled the roofline in close enough that I could see the ridge, the chimney flashing, and a line of lifted shingles near the west gable, none of which were visible from under the eave. The lens did not show me everything, and knowing which…

The first facade survey I ever shot, I shot wrong. It was 2019, a six-story brick building on a side street in Tribeca, and the owner handed me a tablet full of the previous survey’s photographs so I could match the angles. Half of them were taken from across the street at eye level, tilted, with no date and no scale, and two of the cracks the report described were completely invisible in the frames meant to show them. The inspector who came after me was polite about it, but he said the same thing a good property manager had already told me: a survey photograph is not a picture…

For years my job was to look at facade pictures and decide whether they were good enough to run, so I know exactly how a leaning building reads across a desk. The ones that come back are the ones where every vertical line runs true from the sidewalk to the parapet. The ones that get rejected usually have nothing wrong with the exposure or the sharpness. They lean. Last spring I was on a corner in Chicago with a three-flat brick and a six-story masonry block, and I shot the whole block from across the street, because that is the distance that lets a building stand up straight.…

I was standing at the end of a driveway in Lake Oswego last November, rain running off the hood of my jacket, looking up at a two-story house hemmed in by four Douglas firs. The owner wanted the roof documented before the moss came back in spring. I had a ladder on the truck, a 12-foot extension pole in the bed, and a Part 107 drone in the back seat, and over the next hour I put all three on the same roof. Each one showed me something the other two could not, and that is the whole reason the truck carries three tools for one job. What a ladder…