Otto Berkeley
Afterglow
With the days in the UK only now beginning to last a little longer, winter seemed like the perfect time to revisit an interior spot that I hadn't been back to in over a year, and never at night. I'd been curious to see how the Brewer Staircase at Heal's Tottenham Court Road would look without daylight streaming through its windows, but also wary; as well as being one of the most beautiful spiral staircases in London, it's also one of the most frequently photographed, and I didn't want to reshoot it unless I thought I could add a new perspective on the location.
This was shot shortly before the department store closed at the end of a Thursday late-night opening, when the store's customers had dwindled to a handful and after the staff had kindly allowed me to continue shooting for over an hour, experimenting with a variety of angles and reaffirming that the staircase really does yield beautiful results no matter which vantage point you shoot from. In the end I opted for a perspective close to the top of the staircase, but, in comparison to my last take on the location, I focused much more carefully on finding a sense of proportion between the staircase, the banister and the pendant lights descending through the centre of the spiral.
The image required a relatively high ISO so that I could narrow the aperture and keep the shutter at a fairly swift speed while shooting handheld. I bracketed seven exposures and then manually aligned these in Photoshop, blending them using luminosity masks in order to bring out the texture along the stairs while retaining as much detail as possible inside each lamp and controlling the highlights along the banister. I then colour-corrected the image to remove the yellow cast, and used a combination of the Pen Tool and Colour Range selections to isolate the rich warm tones along the steps from the blueish-white light along the banister. After this, I gradually colour-graded the separate portions of the image, applying Curves and Levels adjustments to play up the light reflecting from the pendant lights along the inside of the staircase. The final stages were some minor local contrast adjustments in Nik Color Efex Pro and some gentle dodge-and-burning, mainly to emphasise the detail along the banister and to intensify the shadows at the bottom of the staircase, hopefully giving a sense of the drama and magic which this incredible location evokes on a quiet late night.
You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.
Afterglow
With the days in the UK only now beginning to last a little longer, winter seemed like the perfect time to revisit an interior spot that I hadn't been back to in over a year, and never at night. I'd been curious to see how the Brewer Staircase at Heal's Tottenham Court Road would look without daylight streaming through its windows, but also wary; as well as being one of the most beautiful spiral staircases in London, it's also one of the most frequently photographed, and I didn't want to reshoot it unless I thought I could add a new perspective on the location.
This was shot shortly before the department store closed at the end of a Thursday late-night opening, when the store's customers had dwindled to a handful and after the staff had kindly allowed me to continue shooting for over an hour, experimenting with a variety of angles and reaffirming that the staircase really does yield beautiful results no matter which vantage point you shoot from. In the end I opted for a perspective close to the top of the staircase, but, in comparison to my last take on the location, I focused much more carefully on finding a sense of proportion between the staircase, the banister and the pendant lights descending through the centre of the spiral.
The image required a relatively high ISO so that I could narrow the aperture and keep the shutter at a fairly swift speed while shooting handheld. I bracketed seven exposures and then manually aligned these in Photoshop, blending them using luminosity masks in order to bring out the texture along the stairs while retaining as much detail as possible inside each lamp and controlling the highlights along the banister. I then colour-corrected the image to remove the yellow cast, and used a combination of the Pen Tool and Colour Range selections to isolate the rich warm tones along the steps from the blueish-white light along the banister. After this, I gradually colour-graded the separate portions of the image, applying Curves and Levels adjustments to play up the light reflecting from the pendant lights along the inside of the staircase. The final stages were some minor local contrast adjustments in Nik Color Efex Pro and some gentle dodge-and-burning, mainly to emphasise the detail along the banister and to intensify the shadows at the bottom of the staircase, hopefully giving a sense of the drama and magic which this incredible location evokes on a quiet late night.
You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.