Otto Berkeley
Lockdown
This image was taken during a recent visit to the London School of Economics Library with fellow photographers Slawek Sondaj, Peter Li and Max Vassiades. On the last day of the university winter term we had the location -- which is visited by about 6,500 students and staff each day -- almost entirely to ourselves. Where the library's enormous atrium had been filled with sunlight during my previous visit, the scene late at night took on a much moodier tone, with the vibrant furniture on the now-renovated lower ground floor adding a cheerful splash of contrasting colour.
The set-up for the shot involved extending my tripod's neck horizontally over the spiral ramp's balustrade so that the camera was looking almost directly down. While the library had requested that the final selection of images we provided would not contain visitors, I couldn't resist leaving one student in the frame, who had made himself comfortable on one of the beanbags in the lower ground floor and who provided a sense of the scale of the enormous building.
The image is a blend of nine exposures combined in Photoshop using luminosity masks, with the darker exposures allowing me to tone down the highlights along the walls and inside the lifts, and the brighter exposures adding the cleanest possible finish to the shadows along the steps and lift shaft. Using reflective and radial gradient masks, I then used my brightest exposures to emphasise the light across the glass casing at the base of the lift shaft, as well as the overall exposure of the lower ground floor, where I wanted the viewer's eye to settle after taking in the geometric patterns along the helical ramp.
The colour-grading phase was carried out with a less-is-more approach: the blue along the spiral was desaturated, and the yellow between the seats on the lower-ground floor removed in order to simplify the overall palette to three tones: a muted blue for the spiral, a clean white for the walls, and a vibrant red for the seats. After this, I used a low-opacity monochrome Gradient Map set to Soft Light to gently emphasise the contrast across the image, and a Selective Colour adjustment to add a hint of magenta to the red furniture. Finally, inside Nik's Silver Efex Pro, I lowered the midtone and shadow structure in order to soften the texture of the walls and carpets, as well as amplifying the whites and Soft Contrast, which gave the image a softer feel without affecting the details.
The library's atrium has such a minimalist and contemporary ambience that it's easy to forget the building contains more than 4 million pieces of literature across 50km of shelving. At the same time, I like how the lone student in this image is inevitably working on a laptop, which seems to add a subtle commentary on how learning and research have evolved over the years.
You can also connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, 500px and Google+.
Lockdown
This image was taken during a recent visit to the London School of Economics Library with fellow photographers Slawek Sondaj, Peter Li and Max Vassiades. On the last day of the university winter term we had the location -- which is visited by about 6,500 students and staff each day -- almost entirely to ourselves. Where the library's enormous atrium had been filled with sunlight during my previous visit, the scene late at night took on a much moodier tone, with the vibrant furniture on the now-renovated lower ground floor adding a cheerful splash of contrasting colour.
The set-up for the shot involved extending my tripod's neck horizontally over the spiral ramp's balustrade so that the camera was looking almost directly down. While the library had requested that the final selection of images we provided would not contain visitors, I couldn't resist leaving one student in the frame, who had made himself comfortable on one of the beanbags in the lower ground floor and who provided a sense of the scale of the enormous building.
The image is a blend of nine exposures combined in Photoshop using luminosity masks, with the darker exposures allowing me to tone down the highlights along the walls and inside the lifts, and the brighter exposures adding the cleanest possible finish to the shadows along the steps and lift shaft. Using reflective and radial gradient masks, I then used my brightest exposures to emphasise the light across the glass casing at the base of the lift shaft, as well as the overall exposure of the lower ground floor, where I wanted the viewer's eye to settle after taking in the geometric patterns along the helical ramp.
The colour-grading phase was carried out with a less-is-more approach: the blue along the spiral was desaturated, and the yellow between the seats on the lower-ground floor removed in order to simplify the overall palette to three tones: a muted blue for the spiral, a clean white for the walls, and a vibrant red for the seats. After this, I used a low-opacity monochrome Gradient Map set to Soft Light to gently emphasise the contrast across the image, and a Selective Colour adjustment to add a hint of magenta to the red furniture. Finally, inside Nik's Silver Efex Pro, I lowered the midtone and shadow structure in order to soften the texture of the walls and carpets, as well as amplifying the whites and Soft Contrast, which gave the image a softer feel without affecting the details.
The library's atrium has such a minimalist and contemporary ambience that it's easy to forget the building contains more than 4 million pieces of literature across 50km of shelving. At the same time, I like how the lone student in this image is inevitably working on a laptop, which seems to add a subtle commentary on how learning and research have evolved over the years.
You can also connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, 500px and Google+.