Otto Berkeley
The Hive
This look-up of Wolfgang Buttress' "The Hive" was captured beneath the open-air structure which recently opened inside Kew Gardens. The abstract installation is 17 metres tall and weighs close to 40 tonnes, with its 170,000-piece aluminium latticework originally forming the centrepiece of the UK Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo, where it won the gold-medal for best pavilion.
At a distance the structure resembles a giant swarm of bees, but standing inside it is an immersive and strangely serene experience, with 1,000 LED luminaries and a low meditative humming both controlled by the activity of bees inside an actual hive located nearby. The installation is also intended to highlight the worrying decline in bee population in the UK, and to provide a visual symbol of their role in feeding the planet given that they pollinate 70 of the most important crops we eat.
Between my visits to the location, the installation was heavily advertised across London's underground stations and saw a significant influx of visitors during the school holidays, effectively removing the opportunity to photograph the structure when it's empty. Kew Gardens was already the 15th most-visited attraction in the UK last year, and given the installation's upper-tier glass floor and its educational elements, it's easy to see the family-friendly appeal. During my first visit, however, I was able to capture the image I wanted, narrowly missing several entertaining opportunities to incorporate children into my photo, many of whom had discovered they could crawl across the upper glass floor, peer down at the person holding a camera beneath them and wave enthusiastically. As challenging as it was to capture this shot, it was also a lot of fun.
The image was taken by resting my camera flat on the ground and triggering the shots with a shutter remote. I captured multiple exposures in order to later blend them using luminosity masks in Photoshop, which was invaluable as the mid-morning sun was already high by the time Kew Gardens opened and the darker exposures allowed me to tone down the highlights, while the brighter exposures allowed me to recover the detail in the metal latticework. Once this phase of the workflow was complete, I shifted the balance of the image towards a muted blue tone using a combination of Colour Balance, Selective Colour and Colour Lookup adjustments. After this, I applied a Solid Colour adjustment set to Soft Light, with a layer mask created using Apply Image to target the highlights. Using this, I added a pale yellow tone back into the centre of the image, where sunlight was casting a gentle glow against the aluminium. I then gradually blended in brighter exposures at the centre of the image using a radial Gradient Mask, as well as darker exposures with an inverted version of this Gradient Mask to create a natural vignette. This was important to me as I felt it was what gave the overall image its shape and depth, and the softer and slightly warmer tones at the tip of the structure are what draw the viewer's eye to the centre of the frame.
The final touches were made in Colour Efex Pro, with a sparing amount of the Detail Extractor filter applied to bring out some of the texture in the metalwork, as well as Pro Contrast to intensify the sunlight overhead and give the pattern in the latticework a little more definition. For me, this final stage of editing was when the latticework gained its impact and when it became possible to see how perfectly the structure reflects the natural organisation and arrangement of a bee hive. Despite the industrial and inherently man-made aspects of the metalwork, there's something elegant, organic and fundamentally beautiful about the structure's interlocking pieces and overarching geometry, which perhaps reflects the harmony within nature and underscores the thought that went into this installation's design.
You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.
The Hive
This look-up of Wolfgang Buttress' "The Hive" was captured beneath the open-air structure which recently opened inside Kew Gardens. The abstract installation is 17 metres tall and weighs close to 40 tonnes, with its 170,000-piece aluminium latticework originally forming the centrepiece of the UK Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo, where it won the gold-medal for best pavilion.
At a distance the structure resembles a giant swarm of bees, but standing inside it is an immersive and strangely serene experience, with 1,000 LED luminaries and a low meditative humming both controlled by the activity of bees inside an actual hive located nearby. The installation is also intended to highlight the worrying decline in bee population in the UK, and to provide a visual symbol of their role in feeding the planet given that they pollinate 70 of the most important crops we eat.
Between my visits to the location, the installation was heavily advertised across London's underground stations and saw a significant influx of visitors during the school holidays, effectively removing the opportunity to photograph the structure when it's empty. Kew Gardens was already the 15th most-visited attraction in the UK last year, and given the installation's upper-tier glass floor and its educational elements, it's easy to see the family-friendly appeal. During my first visit, however, I was able to capture the image I wanted, narrowly missing several entertaining opportunities to incorporate children into my photo, many of whom had discovered they could crawl across the upper glass floor, peer down at the person holding a camera beneath them and wave enthusiastically. As challenging as it was to capture this shot, it was also a lot of fun.
The image was taken by resting my camera flat on the ground and triggering the shots with a shutter remote. I captured multiple exposures in order to later blend them using luminosity masks in Photoshop, which was invaluable as the mid-morning sun was already high by the time Kew Gardens opened and the darker exposures allowed me to tone down the highlights, while the brighter exposures allowed me to recover the detail in the metal latticework. Once this phase of the workflow was complete, I shifted the balance of the image towards a muted blue tone using a combination of Colour Balance, Selective Colour and Colour Lookup adjustments. After this, I applied a Solid Colour adjustment set to Soft Light, with a layer mask created using Apply Image to target the highlights. Using this, I added a pale yellow tone back into the centre of the image, where sunlight was casting a gentle glow against the aluminium. I then gradually blended in brighter exposures at the centre of the image using a radial Gradient Mask, as well as darker exposures with an inverted version of this Gradient Mask to create a natural vignette. This was important to me as I felt it was what gave the overall image its shape and depth, and the softer and slightly warmer tones at the tip of the structure are what draw the viewer's eye to the centre of the frame.
The final touches were made in Colour Efex Pro, with a sparing amount of the Detail Extractor filter applied to bring out some of the texture in the metalwork, as well as Pro Contrast to intensify the sunlight overhead and give the pattern in the latticework a little more definition. For me, this final stage of editing was when the latticework gained its impact and when it became possible to see how perfectly the structure reflects the natural organisation and arrangement of a bee hive. Despite the industrial and inherently man-made aspects of the metalwork, there's something elegant, organic and fundamentally beautiful about the structure's interlocking pieces and overarching geometry, which perhaps reflects the harmony within nature and underscores the thought that went into this installation's design.
You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.