DCC Kilmainham Project I

I joined Dublin Camera Club in August 2008 and have tried to be an active member of the club ever since.  At the end of 2008 the club was given the opportunity to photograph Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin with a view to holding an exhibition there in the middle of 2009.  I am part of the group of club members that are working on this project, and will post some of the images I’ve captured here with some information on how I took them, and how I post-processed them.  Detail on the shot above after the jump.

This image is from my first visit to the gaol.  During that visit I spent most of my time photographing the basement area, armed with my trusty lighting kit to light what can be a dull grey area.

Since I took this shot I’ve seen other photographer’s work and some have produced a comparable lighting effect with just ambient light, which I suppose you could argue renders my strobist approach a bit redundant.  However the ambient shots I took that day were dull and lifeless and the contrast was too great to keep detail in the highlights and the shadows.   Also, I wanted to add a little colour to balance the large number of mono images this exhibition is likely to contain.  It’s that kind of a place.

This shot is actually a composite of two shots (seen right) for one simple reason – I wanted to light 2 windows and a door, and had only 2 strobes.  Between each door and window is a brick wall about 3 feet wide, so there’s not a whole lot of scope for filling two openings with light from one strobe.

I put two strobes, one in each window (which, incidentally are internal windows between the corridor where the camera is and what used be kitchens), with a half-CTO gel on each to warm up the light.  To soften the light, both strobes are fired through shoot-through umbrellas and are just out of view in that adjacent room.  I moved one light stand as is to light the door frame from inside the room, and fired off another shot.

I don’t remember what the flash settings were – probably about 1/4 power.  The lens is a fisheye, to take in the etchings on the wall at top right.  It’s been said they aren’t authentic (that is, that they’re not from a time the gaol was in use as a gaol).  I don’t know if this is true, but either way they add to the picture, and we’re capturing Kilmainham as it is now, not as it was then.

The strobes were fired via CLS, somewhat problematically due to line of sight issues, using the pop-up flash on my D300.

I merged the two in Photoshop and selectively deleted areas of each to bring in the light from the other – fast and crude, but I’m not yet a PS guru. Before this goes to print, I’ll re-do the composite in PS at full resolution – I was lazy and merged these at low resolution just to see how it would look.  Overall I like the shot.

Overground in Kilmainham, I’m using a mixture of ambient light and strobes to practice my technique and hopefully get some shots for the exhibition.  I’ll post on some of those in the future.