Otto Berkeley
Spiralis
Hidden away between council housing blocks and the railway viaduct near Vauxhall Station is Newport Street Gallery, which houses work from Damien Hirst's 3,000-strong art collection. The exhibition space was designed by architecture firm Caruso St John, whose work at Tate Britain I photographed after the gallery's renovation several years ago. The gallery also contains three staircases, each of them a slightly different shape and with slightly different lighting from windows and skylights, but all of them featuring wonderfully tactile timber stairs and lined with brick walls, and all of them delightfully photogenic.
I visited the location repeatedly over several months, shooting at different angles, at different times of the day and in different weather conditions, slowly discovering how the smallest change in external lighting affected the interior's finish and ambience. This is my take on the central ovoid spiral, looking down from the upper level, which seemed to me to have the right sense of proportion between the path of the stairs, the patterns in the wall and the fluid and somewhat whimsical shape of the balustrade. It was shot on a clear day, when the sun was lighting up the staircase perfectly but also just out of sight to minimise the amount of direct light that could wash out the detail in the stairs.
At the post-processing stage, I desaturated the warmer tones in the walls and shifted these towards a cooler and more muted tone, with hints of cyan in the shadows that I felt complemented the rich warm tone in the stairs. It was important to me to retain the location's clean and minimalist feel, but at the same time to bring out the texture in both the brick wall and the staircase itself. I had been shooting handheld but captured several exposures, and blended these using a combination of luminosity masking and the Pen Tool in Photoshop, incorporating my base exposure for the stairs but incorporating brighter exposures for the balustrade and darker exposures for the walls. This enabled me to emphasise the brickwork in the wall and the nuances in the staircase without compromising the image's overall tone, which hopefully conveys the bright and grandiose but also subtly intricate aspects of the location.
You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.
Spiralis
Hidden away between council housing blocks and the railway viaduct near Vauxhall Station is Newport Street Gallery, which houses work from Damien Hirst's 3,000-strong art collection. The exhibition space was designed by architecture firm Caruso St John, whose work at Tate Britain I photographed after the gallery's renovation several years ago. The gallery also contains three staircases, each of them a slightly different shape and with slightly different lighting from windows and skylights, but all of them featuring wonderfully tactile timber stairs and lined with brick walls, and all of them delightfully photogenic.
I visited the location repeatedly over several months, shooting at different angles, at different times of the day and in different weather conditions, slowly discovering how the smallest change in external lighting affected the interior's finish and ambience. This is my take on the central ovoid spiral, looking down from the upper level, which seemed to me to have the right sense of proportion between the path of the stairs, the patterns in the wall and the fluid and somewhat whimsical shape of the balustrade. It was shot on a clear day, when the sun was lighting up the staircase perfectly but also just out of sight to minimise the amount of direct light that could wash out the detail in the stairs.
At the post-processing stage, I desaturated the warmer tones in the walls and shifted these towards a cooler and more muted tone, with hints of cyan in the shadows that I felt complemented the rich warm tone in the stairs. It was important to me to retain the location's clean and minimalist feel, but at the same time to bring out the texture in both the brick wall and the staircase itself. I had been shooting handheld but captured several exposures, and blended these using a combination of luminosity masking and the Pen Tool in Photoshop, incorporating my base exposure for the stairs but incorporating brighter exposures for the balustrade and darker exposures for the walls. This enabled me to emphasise the brickwork in the wall and the nuances in the staircase without compromising the image's overall tone, which hopefully conveys the bright and grandiose but also subtly intricate aspects of the location.
You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.