That's great Isi_C, thank you. Variety is a good thing if you can manage that.
I'll share a little more with everyone at this point to try and keep the momentum. Those of you with photography knowledge, please add points you feel will help us:
We need a variety of buildings in your area: roofs, houses, apartments, flats, shops, industrial units. Try to go for standard/common types of buildings (fancy architecture will be easy to spot if it's used in different places in flightgear)
OK, top tips for your new flightgear texture photographs:
1. It's got to be a cloudy day (or buildings / roofs that are in the shade)
2. Get as square on as possible (position yourself directly in front of your scene as best you can, not off at an angle). Extreme perspective angles will not work well, flat or nearly flat images work best. Looking down from bridges or apartment balconies can get great shots of roofs and tiles, take care and use a camera strap
3. Use a longer lens on your camera if you have one or zoom in. For mobile phones, digital zooms work differently so avoid using digital zoom. Do leave a bit of space around the building in your picture (but see the part about exposure)
4. Use manual exposure if you know how, for mobiles it might be possible to 'raise' exposure - watch out for automatic settings reducing your exposure especially if there is some sky in the picture (this can cause the texture to be too dark). Avoid HDR (High Dynamic Range settings)
4.5 [edit] forgot this one - set your 'white balance' manually if you know how or on mobiles set to daylight/shade or cloudy. This will help get accurate colours on your device.
5. Get as clean an image as possible. This can be quite tricky when cars/people/trees get in the way) but use your judgment and take the photo if you think there is a part of the picture we could duplicate to clean up the texture and hide the obstruction.
6. Massive bonus: If possible take the exact same picture at night too (you might need a tripod as the slightly longer exposure times required introduce motion blur)
There is no reason you can't start now or this weekend (if it's cloudy)
we'll also need to release photos under creative commons (CC0 would be best) but we'll get to that and also decide where we can upload our textures for the next part of the process.
Roofs
Houses / rows
Apartment blocks
Flats
Shop fronts
industrial units
Please keep us all updated here about how you get on with your photographs of buildings or if you need some more tips just ask.
Volador