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An airplane in evening sun above the Bay Adelaide Centre and Scotia Plaza in Toronto's financial district.
This year's summer pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery, located inside Kensington Gardens, was designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. The paraboloid enclosure has been described by the architect as an unzipped wall, and has the look and feel of a linear structure that's been stretched and prized open. The beauty of the design is that despite its sculptural elegance it's essentially a stack of 1800 rectangular fibreglass blocks.
The pavilion is quirky, innovative and interesting enough on the outside, but it wasn't until I was standing inside the structure that I realised how much I was going to enjoy photographing and editing it. This image was captured at the centre of the pavilion, looking directly upwards towards the blocks as they converge overhead, taking in a design that somehow manages to convey opacity and translucence at the same time, creating an atmosphere that's both cavernous and cathedralesque.
I visited on a couple of occasions after the pavilion opened to the public and shot from several vantage points and in different weather conditions, but found that an overcast day produced the right level of soft, even light streaming between the blocks. As several of the design's blocks are scattered throughout the pavilion's interior and being used as seats, I used one of these to steady the camera so that I could capture multiple exposures and later blend them together in Photoshop.
I shot using a higher ISO than I would usually resort to without a tripod, but knew I would weight the postprocessing towards the brighter exposures and would need a very sharp finish for these. My aim was to produce an image that reflected some of Ingels' previous architectural work, which includes creative interpretations of snowfalkes and mountains, and there was an amazing glacial feel to this design which I wanted to emphasise by leaning towards a clean, crystalline, high-key finish.
Once the exposures had been manually realigned and blended via luminosity masks, I gently added portions of the brighter exposures using a combination of radial and reflective gradient masks and setting these to Luminosity and Screen blend modes, brightening the centre of the image while taking care not to clip the highlights. I then inverted these layer masks and applied them to the darker exposures around the outside of the frame, effectively adding a natural vignette to the image using the RAW files. With this phase of editing complete, I applied selective contrast adjustments using Silver Efex Pro, increasing the Soft Light contrast but also lowering the midtone brightness and shadow structure to emphasise a dreamy finish. At the same time, I applied a very sparing amount of Colour Efex Pro's Detail Extractor to bring out the grainy texture inside the fibreglass boxes along the outside of the frame, which I felt was part of what gave the image its tone and character.
I did my best to retain a minimum level of dignity while shooting this image, despite crawling along the ground as I aimed the camera upwards and experimented with different compositions. Apparently failing to blend into the crowd, I was spotted by a delightful lady who seemed to be glowing with excitement. She told me she wasn't supposed to say anything, but that if I was interested in the pavilion's architecture I should speak to its designer, who was standing a few feet away and talking to a colleague, and whom she proudly identified as her son. I wasn't surprised to see Ingels visiting the pavilion so shortly after it opened and given that he's currently developing Google's London headquarters at King's Cross, but there was something quite touching about the fact that he brought his mother to see his latest project. I politely acknowledged how proud she must be, and said I hoped her son was aware of how popular the pavilion had already become with the London photo community. This seemed to thrill her even more, and she began animatedly describing the challenges her son had overcome at the design and construction stages before the project was signed off. At this point Ingels was making his way out of the pavilion, and wishing not to be left behind, she bid me good day. I thanked her for sharing the secret she was clearly struggling to keep to herself, and couldn't help wondering how much of her son's passion for architecture had been inherited by the bubbly and exuberant lady I'd just met.
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