Monday, February 22, 2010

Spooky Old Hospital

Taken Saturday in Baytown, Texas. This is the old San Jacinto Hospital building. It has all the usual outward signs of abandonment including broken windows, boarded up windows, graffiti and an intimidating perimeter fence. The building is really quite spooky looking but it's hard to convey "spooky" in a photo taken on a beautiful day with blue sky and fluffy white clouds. Compositionally I tried to make the shot spooky by including the fencing in the foreground and by taking the shot at an unusual angle. I think the lens distortion resulting from using the wide angle end of my zoom adds to the effect. Post-processing included playing with some of the Photoshop blending modes (color dodge, color burn, multiply, overlay) till I got to a place I thought looked spooky (or at least eerie). I'm sure this place looked a lot less spooky 5 decades ago when I was born here! :-)

Title: "Spooky Old Hospital"


Camera / Lens: Canon 5D Mark II / Canon 24-105mm L zoom
Post-processing: Photomatix Pro to convert three exposure bracketed (-2, 0, +2) hand held images into one HDR (High Dynamic Range) image > Photoshop CS4 > Topaz Adjust plugin

3 comments:

Larry said...

Good job on the post-processing, I think it achieves your goal.

Barry Armer said...

Thanks Larry!

I appreciate the feedback!

Cheers!
Barry

Larry J. Patrick said...

I like the surreal look of this one. Good color combination, camera angle and post processing.