I should really call this post “A night outside the Grand Canal Theatre” because last night I finally got the chance to visit Grand Canal Dock and see this fantastic building for myself, but I didn’t step inside the door. Instead I spent about 80 minutes photographing the theatre and its surrounds from the outside and I think I’ve developed a photographic crush on the building and the environment in which it sits. The whole area actually reminds me of Circular Quay and Sydney Opera House – although I was surprised that it wasn’t particularly lively last night – and like the Sydney Opera House, I don’t think I’d easily get sick of photographing this theatre.
I arrived at about 9.15pm as the sun was setting, and spent about 5 minutes trying to find some angles from which to photograph the theatre. The very first frame I took was from Hanover Quay and to be perfectly honest had I been required to leave straight away, even though it was more a test shot for when it would be darker, I’d have been more than happy with getting this out of my visit:
You can see how I returned to this spot for the photo at the top of this post, opting for a vertical orientation of the camera later on to match the way the quay leads up to the theatre. I also switched to a wide aperture for the later photo to throw the theatre a little out of focus.
In between these two photographs I explored other viewpoints and areas around the dock. A centre piece of the area is the installation of red sticks in the Martha Schwartz designed plaza. As I wandered I liked this angle which put them against a background of the towers of the Ringsend ESB power station, which are arguably the most famous red (and white) sticks in the country.
The area as a whole is quite industrial, though not without a bit of flora and fauna. At one point I was trying out a composition which framed the theatre with some of the greenery planted in the piazza and as I pressed the shutter the camera’s autofocus took over and gave me this, which I actually liked better than what I had been trying to get, although I’d have composed differently if this had been the intention all along.
At about 10pm the area suddenly lit up, with those red sticks illuminating, and green strip lighting around the piazza being switched on, presumably in anticipation of the finish of whatever performance was taking place in the theatre. The illumination changed the area photographically too, and over the next forty minutes I got snap happy with my camera as I started seeing more photographs than I could take before the ambient light levels fell. I’ll post some of those photographs tomorrow.
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