Otto Berkeley
Sleeping Giants
After six months of redevelopment, the Natural History Museum this month reopened its centrepiece, Hintze Hall, with Dippy the Diplodocus replaced by the skeleton of a 25-metre blue whale named Hope. I was fortunate to be able to visit the museum a few days after it opened, and to behold the remarkable sight of this creature -- the largest ever to have lived -- suspended from the hall's ceiling and diving downwards with its jaws open.
Having last photographed Hintze Hall more than two years ago, it was fun to return to the location and to try an angle I hadn't photographed in a while. The challenge here is always the immense number of visitors the museum welcomes each day, and my workflow to capture the scene nearly empty was similar to my previous take, which is to say about 45 minutes of continuous shooting and then using Photoshop's Statistics function within the Scripts menu to calculate and remove any inconsistent elements. In addition to bracketing my exposures so that I could later blend them using luminosity masks, I was also drawn to the dramatic mid-morning sunlight coming through the windows, which cast a warm glow on Hope and created a wonderful array of patterns along the hall's floor. The sun on this particular morning was constantly dipping behind the clouds, however, so I was restricted to shooting only when the sun reappeared, as well as trying to capture each part of the scene without people at least once to ensure a clean and straightforward editing process.
Although I'd bracketed nine exposures and had a range of tonality to work with, the bulk of my workflow was geared towards the darker exposures, which captured all of the detail in the museum's windows and a moody sense of mystery beneath its arches, as well as emphasising the pattern of light and shadow along the ground. With this said, I used the brighter exposures to gently restore detail to the brickwork and to emphasise portions of the building's architecture, for example J. W. Beaufort's portrait of Alfred Russel Wallace to the right of Darwin's statue. After this, I used a mixture of Curves, Hue/Saturation, Colour Balance, Selective Colour and Gradient Map adjustments to find the right shade of blue for the shadows and to emphasise the warmth of the sunlight streaming through the windows. Inside Nik's Colour Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro, I significantly lowered the midtones and softened the structure across the museum's floor, as well as applying a small amount of the Detail Extractor and Tonal Contrast filters to the walls to bring out their texture.
The mother and son beneath the whale were added further along in the workflow, but I felt they completed the image. Besides providing a sense of the scale of the skeleton towering over them, there seemed to be something meaningful about their presence beneath a display that's intended as a symbol of humanity's power to shape a sustainable future. This particular whale was stranded at Wexford Harbour in southeast Ireland in 1871, but the species was hunted to the brink of extinction during the 20th century, with the blue whale being the first species that humans finally resolved to save on a global scale. Their population has steadily begun to climb again, hence the name Hope, and there seemed to be something very hopeful about a parent and child visiting an environment where everyone is encouraged to be a part of that change.
You can also connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, 500px and Google+.
Sleeping Giants
After six months of redevelopment, the Natural History Museum this month reopened its centrepiece, Hintze Hall, with Dippy the Diplodocus replaced by the skeleton of a 25-metre blue whale named Hope. I was fortunate to be able to visit the museum a few days after it opened, and to behold the remarkable sight of this creature -- the largest ever to have lived -- suspended from the hall's ceiling and diving downwards with its jaws open.
Having last photographed Hintze Hall more than two years ago, it was fun to return to the location and to try an angle I hadn't photographed in a while. The challenge here is always the immense number of visitors the museum welcomes each day, and my workflow to capture the scene nearly empty was similar to my previous take, which is to say about 45 minutes of continuous shooting and then using Photoshop's Statistics function within the Scripts menu to calculate and remove any inconsistent elements. In addition to bracketing my exposures so that I could later blend them using luminosity masks, I was also drawn to the dramatic mid-morning sunlight coming through the windows, which cast a warm glow on Hope and created a wonderful array of patterns along the hall's floor. The sun on this particular morning was constantly dipping behind the clouds, however, so I was restricted to shooting only when the sun reappeared, as well as trying to capture each part of the scene without people at least once to ensure a clean and straightforward editing process.
Although I'd bracketed nine exposures and had a range of tonality to work with, the bulk of my workflow was geared towards the darker exposures, which captured all of the detail in the museum's windows and a moody sense of mystery beneath its arches, as well as emphasising the pattern of light and shadow along the ground. With this said, I used the brighter exposures to gently restore detail to the brickwork and to emphasise portions of the building's architecture, for example J. W. Beaufort's portrait of Alfred Russel Wallace to the right of Darwin's statue. After this, I used a mixture of Curves, Hue/Saturation, Colour Balance, Selective Colour and Gradient Map adjustments to find the right shade of blue for the shadows and to emphasise the warmth of the sunlight streaming through the windows. Inside Nik's Colour Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro, I significantly lowered the midtones and softened the structure across the museum's floor, as well as applying a small amount of the Detail Extractor and Tonal Contrast filters to the walls to bring out their texture.
The mother and son beneath the whale were added further along in the workflow, but I felt they completed the image. Besides providing a sense of the scale of the skeleton towering over them, there seemed to be something meaningful about their presence beneath a display that's intended as a symbol of humanity's power to shape a sustainable future. This particular whale was stranded at Wexford Harbour in southeast Ireland in 1871, but the species was hunted to the brink of extinction during the 20th century, with the blue whale being the first species that humans finally resolved to save on a global scale. Their population has steadily begun to climb again, hence the name Hope, and there seemed to be something very hopeful about a parent and child visiting an environment where everyone is encouraged to be a part of that change.
You can also connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, 500px and Google+.