The Dublin Camera Club exhibition in Kilmainham Gaol is coming to an end next weekend so if you haven’t yet been I recommend a visit to the exhibition (and indeed the gaol) as an interesting way to spend a few hours. When you are there, I believe you will see a photograph which looks very like the one above, although it is a better image, is in colour, and wasn’t taken by me.
That shot was captured by a fellow club member, Melissa Collins, and last Tuesday deservedly scooped a prize in the camera club’s summer competition in the Colour Print category. When I saw it (not for the first time) on Tuesday during the judging I was struck by how similar an image it was to this one, and both photographs were taken completely independently on different visits to the gaol.
I think the fact that we both (I believe) used a fisheye lens for the shot meant our compositions were going to be constrained to such an extent as to force us to take the shot from about the same place. The fisheye curves straight lines, except those that run through the centre, so when I composed this shot I was conscious to position the camera so that the staircase remained straight.
Equally, I wanted to keep the beam running across from the stairs relatively level. I should point out that my shot is a crop of the full image I captured, so the beam is straight, but not in the middle of the frame. Cropping a fisheye shot is one good way of avoiding the need to have entirely central compositions.
I processed this shot reasonably heavily before converting to monochrome and adding a very slight tint. You may have seen a similar view of the east wing on the blog before, although it was taken from the other side, and a level up. It shows the colour of the room, so I chose to let this shot show some of the detail.
Recent Comments