I Almost Became an Architect
I almost became an architect. Years later, photography has brought that old interest back through buildings, lines, light, reflections, and the details I never used to notice.
PHOTO JOURNAL 2026
James Bradley
10/8/20268 min read
I Almost Became an Architect
I Almost Became an Architect
When I was in high school, one of the things I seriously considered doing with my life was architecture. Obviously, that is not exactly where I ended up.
Life has a funny way of taking the plans you make when you’re seventeen and throwing them into a blender. I went in completely different directions, built a career, raised a family, picked up more hobbies than any reasonable person needs, and architecture became one of those old ideas that quietly disappeared into the background. At least I thought it did.
Then I got serious about photography again. Somewhere during this daily challenge, I started noticing how often buildings, bridges, doors, windows, stairways, old structures, and interesting pieces of architecture kept ending up in front of my camera. I wasn’t intentionally trying to become an architectural photographer. I was just seeing things I liked and taking pictures of them. Eventually I had to admit there might be a connection. Apparently seventeen-year-old James is still in there somewhere.
Why Buildings?
I photograph a lot of different things. Wildlife probably gets more attention because birds are constantly doing something interesting or flying away exactly three-tenths of a second before I get the shot. Landscapes are obvious. Reflections have become their own little obsession. Sports are teaching me timing, anticipation, and how many photographs it is possible to take without getting the one I wanted.
Architecture is different. Buildings generally stay put. Thank you.
After spending an afternoon chasing birds, there is something wonderfully reassuring about pointing the camera at a building and knowing there is a pretty good chance it will still be there when I finish changing lenses. Of course, that doesn’t mean photographing architecture is easy. The building may not move, but everything around it does. The light changes. Cars show up. People walk through the frame. Clouds move. Shadows shift. I move five feet to the left and suddenly the entire composition looks different.
The subject may cooperate, but the photograph still makes me work for it. I think part of the attraction is that buildings give me time to look. I can walk around them. I can study the lines. I can look at how different shapes fit together. I can see what the light is doing on one side and compare it with the other. There is no bird getting impatient with me.
Architecture Lets Me Look at the Details
The more photography I do, the more interested I become in details. That surprised me.
I used to think photographing a building meant photographing the building. Stand far enough away to get the whole thing in the frame, push the shutter button, and there you go. Building photo. Technically, I suppose that works.
But sometimes the interesting part isn’t the entire structure. It may be one window. A doorway. The curve of an arch. The way a staircase repeats the same shape over and over. Brickwork. Old wood. Steel. Glass reflecting the sky. A pattern created by several balconies. A shadow cutting diagonally across a wall.
Sometimes the building itself becomes almost irrelevant because one small part of it is what actually caught my attention. Photography has been teaching me to stop thinking that the entire subject has to fit into the picture. That was not obvious to me at first. My grasp of the obvious baffles me some days.
Lines Are Everywhere
Architecture is full of lines, and once I started paying attention to them I began seeing them everywhere. Roof lines. Window frames. Columns. Sidewalks. Railings. Bridges. Stairs. Hallways. Beams. Roads leading toward buildings.
A camera turns all of that into a giant composition exercise. Where does the line enter the frame? Where does it take my eye? Does it point toward something useful, or does it send me right out the side of the picture?
This sounds like I know what I’m doing. Let’s not get carried away.
Most of the time I’m still looking through the viewfinder, moving around, and thinking, “Nope. That looks like crap. What if I stand over here?” Then I move. Sometimes six inches fixes it. Sometimes I walk completely around the building. Sometimes I discover the photograph I thought I wanted isn’t the photograph at all.
That’s one of the things I like about architectural subjects. They reward wandering around and changing perspective. They aren’t going anywhere. Hopefully. If the building starts moving, photography is probably no longer my biggest problem.
The Old Stuff Gets My Attention
I find myself especially interested in buildings and structures that show some age. Old barns. Industrial buildings. Historic downtowns. Bridges. Farm structures. Anything where you can see that it has been there awhile.
Perfect new buildings can be interesting, especially if the design is unusual, but old structures have another layer. They have wear. Repairs. Faded paint. Rust. Cracks. Additions that clearly happened decades after the original building went up.
There is evidence of people. Somebody designed it. Somebody built it. Somebody maintained it. Somebody changed it. Someone may have worked there every day for thirty years.
I may know absolutely nothing about that history when I take the photograph, but I can still see that the structure has a story. Maybe that is part of why architecture appeals to me. I like things that were built to do something.
A barn had a purpose. A bridge has a purpose. A factory has a purpose. Even a ridiculous-looking old building usually exists because somebody needed something and figured out how to build it. There is something satisfying about that.
Maybe the equipment operator and woodworker parts of my brain are getting involved now too. I like seeing how things are put together. Apparently all my hobbies have started talking to each other.
Travel Gives Me a Lot to Work With
One advantage of traveling as much as I do is that architecture changes constantly. I can leave Idaho and suddenly the buildings look different. Different materials. Different age. Different colors. Different rooflines. Different ways of dealing with weather. Different history.
Sometimes I’m in an old downtown with buildings that have been standing there longer than anybody currently walking past them. Other times I’m looking at a modern structure made almost entirely of glass and steel.
Airports are their own architectural category. Some are impressive. Some feel like they were designed by someone who actively hated passengers. You know the airports I’m talking about.
The sign says your gate is twelve minutes away. That’s a lie. It’s twelve minutes away if you are an Olympic sprinter with no luggage.
Still, airports have huge windows, repeating patterns, long hallways, escalators, shadows, reflections, and all kinds of interesting geometry. They may annoy the hell out of me as a traveler while giving me plenty to look at as a photographer. That seems unfair.
Hotels occasionally surprise me too. Most of them are designed around the revolutionary architectural principle of “make every room look exactly the same,” but every once in a while there is an interesting lobby, staircase, window, light fixture, or exterior line that catches my attention. The daily challenge gives me an excuse to notice those things instead of simply walking through them.
I Wonder What Seventeen-Year-Old Me Saw
Thinking about architecture again has made me wonder what attracted me to it when I was younger. I honestly don’t remember every reason. Maybe it was drawing. Maybe it was building things. Maybe it was the idea of designing something that eventually became real.
I do know there was something about architecture that interested me enough to consider it seriously. Then life happened and I went somewhere else. I don’t regret that. I’ve had an interesting career and done things teenage me never would have predicted.
But photography has a strange way of circling back to old interests. Now I’m not designing the building. I’m deciding how I want to see it.
That is a completely different skill, but there is something familiar about it. I’m still thinking about shape, lines, balance, proportion, light, and how separate pieces work together. I’m just doing it through a viewfinder instead of on a drafting table. Funny how that works.
Perspective Can Make a Normal Building Look Completely Different
One thing I’m starting to enjoy is trying to make an ordinary structure look less ordinary. That may mean getting really low and pointing the camera upward. It may mean standing close with a wide-angle lens and exaggerating the lines. It might mean moving farther away and using something in the foreground to frame the building. Sometimes I’m looking for symmetry. Other times the picture gets more interesting when everything is slightly off-center.
I’m also learning that vertical lines can become a pain in the ass very quickly. Point a wide-angle lens upward at a tall building and suddenly the building looks like it is leaning backward.
Congratulations. I have apparently photographed a structure that is preparing to fall over.
Some of that can be corrected when I edit. Some of it can be avoided by changing where I stand or how I hold the camera. Sometimes I actually like the distortion because it makes the building feel taller or more dramatic.
That’s something I’m still figuring out. Not every technical imperfection automatically ruins a photograph. Sometimes the “wrong” perspective is exactly what makes the picture interesting.
There’s probably a life lesson hiding in there somewhere. I’m ignoring it for now.
Light Changes the Building
Architecture is also teaching me how dramatically light changes a subject that doesn’t move. The building can sit in exactly the same place all day and look completely different every hour.
Early morning light hits one side. Midday light flattens everything out. Late-afternoon light creates long shadows and warms up the surfaces. Cloudy skies soften things. Storm clouds can make a completely ordinary building suddenly look dramatic. At night, windows light up and the structure becomes something different again.
The subject never moved. The photograph changed anyway. That is kind of fascinating.
It also means I can photograph the same structure more than once without necessarily making the same picture. This comes up constantly in the daily challenge. I revisit places. Market Lake. Areas around home. Places I travel to repeatedly. I used to wonder if photographing the same location over and over was somehow cheating.
It isn’t.
The place may be the same. The conditions almost never are. Neither am I. I’m learning more every time I go back.
Architecture and Reflections Are Apparently Friends
One thing I’ve noticed is that two of my photographic interests overlap constantly. Architecture and reflections.
Glass buildings reflect everything. Windows catch skies, clouds, other buildings, streetlights, people, cars, and whatever else happens to be nearby. A building beside water gives me even more trouble because now I’m immediately looking for the reflection instead of the building itself. Apparently I can’t help it.
Sometimes the reflection makes the architecture more interesting than the actual structure. Sometimes the reflection distorts the lines. Sometimes it turns a perfectly straight building into something abstract.
That is another thing photography has taught me. I don’t always need to photograph something literally. A building can become shapes. Lines. Color. Light. Reflection. A fragment.
That is a completely different way of seeing architecture than simply documenting what the structure looks like.
The Daily Challenge Keeps Bringing Me Back to It
The nice thing about architecture is that it solves one of the ongoing problems with a daily photography challenge. There is usually a building somewhere.
Birds may hide. Wildlife may refuse to cooperate. The sunset may be terrible. The flowers may be done for the year. The weather may be miserable.
But buildings? They’re pretty reliable.
I can be traveling for work, stuck in a city I know nothing about, and there will usually be something built by somebody that is worth looking at. Maybe it’s an old church. A courthouse. A bridge. A grain elevator. A barn. An airport terminal. A strange modern building. Or just one doorway with really good light hitting it.
I still have to find the photograph. That’s the fun part.
Maybe I Didn’t Leave Architecture Behind After All
I have no idea what my life would have looked like if I had followed that high school idea and become an architect. Probably very different. Maybe I would have loved it. Maybe I would have hated it. Maybe I would have spent forty years explaining to people why moving a wall six feet after the building was designed is not as simple as they think.
Who knows?
What I do know is that the interest apparently never completely disappeared. It just changed forms.
Now I get to look at what other people built. I get to decide what part catches my attention. I get to walk around it, study the light, find the lines, look for reflections, change my perspective, and try to make a photograph that shows what made me stop.
I never became an architect.
But every once in a while, when I’m standing in front of an interesting building with the camera in my hand, I think seventeen-year-old James might be pretty happy with how things turned out.