Tony Kersting, or A. F. Kersting, as he usually appeared on the title pages of his many books, was the most prolific and widely travelled architectural photographer of his generation.

Throughout his life he remained resolutely of the old school, using a plate camera. For many years he used glass negatives, until these were succeeded by large-format individual sheets of film, which assured equally high quality — he never moved on to roll film. One virtue of a plate camera is a “rising front”, which makes it possible to eliminate converging verticals and avoid distortion.

Kersting rarely did scenery. Almost all his classic photographs concentrate on buildings, superbly conveying their presence, strength and monumentality. For Kersting it appeared the sun always shone, though many shots must have involved long waits or repeat visits.

He made brilliant use of shadow to bring out the modelling and silhouette of cathedrals, churches, castles and civic buildings. Nor can it have been easy to take architectural shots free of people, when setting up a tripod and scrutinising an upside-down image under a black cloth was a sure way to attract a crowd.

Kersting seduced his customers with stunningly sharp black-and-white prints, always in a generous 8in x 10in format. He was the first call for many publishers and architectural historians. He illustrated books for the National Trust and many of the county volumes of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England as well as the excellent Buildings of Edinburgh. Arthur Mee’s rather forgotten volumes on the counties of England were also a staple. They were published by Batsford, which for many years was one of his most important sources of work.

His Batsford volumes include books on Cirencester (1951), Sussex and Kent (both 1976) and later Suffolk (1984). One of his most important Batsford commissions was a large number of pictures for Margeret Jourdain’s English Interior Decoration (1950).

After the death of Olive Cook’s husband, the great photographer Edwin Smith, Kersting collaborated with her on The English Country House (1984). He did a series of “Portraits” of Cambridge, Oxford, Westminster and Edinburgh and illustrated Geoffrey Beard’s The Work of Sir Christopher Wren and Colin Platt’s The Architecture of Medieval Britain.

Though he received regular commissions from Country Life in the 1950s, and contributed to the Country Life picture book series on London and other places, Kersting never really broke into the world of magazines which increasingly provided the bulk of lucrative work for architectural photographers.

This was partly because he did not have quite the technique or the eye for the furnished interiors which increasingly became the staple of architectural and interior magazines. Certainly he could take stunning pictures of cathedral naves and great halls but, especially in the early days of colour film, interior photography was an experimental business requiring long exposures and often involved huge wastage.

Kersting was predominantly a black-and-white man, though a corpus of his colour photographs is held by AKG Images. His patience made him an excellent photographer of towns — his pictures are miraculously without traffic and mercifully free of street clutter.

Kersting, despite his gentle beaming smile, was a shy and retiring man and even to long-standing colleagues much about his life was a mystery.

Anthony Frank Kersting was born in 1916 at a large newly built house in Wandsworth, South London, which his banker father first rented and then bought in 1918 for £675 17s 6d. This was to remain his home all his life, an Edwardian time capsule which he steadily filled with thousands of boxes of glass negatives.