Concrete is never grey

Raw concrete picks up the colour of everything near it. Learn to see it before you shoot it.

Grass turns it green, a red door turns it warm, a clear sky turns it cold. The same wall can look like four materials across one day.

Reading the wall

I walk the building with a grey card before I take a picture. Where the colour shifts, I note the hour and plan the frame around it.

What I keep

• The warmth of late sun on a south wall
• The cool of a north stair
• Never one fixed white balance for the whole set

Architects pour concrete to show the material. The pictures should show it changing, because that is what living with it is like.