City/Urban

My idea for this part of the brief was to explore more of a hidden side of the city. Urban decay. I wanted to visit some abandoned places and photograph its current state. Luckily we found an amazing abandoned hospital very close to home. I wanted to explore the dark and light areas, capturing light and shadow to portray emotion. I wanted the images to have a gritty dirty feel to them and show the building really crumbling. I intend to visit the hospital a few times using my canon digital camera and Photoshop, as I feel Photoshop is an area I need to improve. Another alternative would be to use film, I feel a Holga or other old kiddy style camera's would have suited this image, although I dont enjoy working with film as much so I stuck to digital.

I visited the hospital four times in all, the first trip not being totally successful and only reaching a very dark boarded up first floor. The following trips were way more successful and we managed to get to the very top floor with the nurses quaters in. Involving a lot of climbing through windows and over small walls, but never breaking an entry, as really not wanting to damage anything else in the building keeping it exactly as it was. It was very worth it!


































All in all I am proud of the outcome of these images. I've uploaded a lot of images as I felt contact sheets really didn't do them justice and I'd rather just post many for you all. I felt I succeeded in capturing a gritty, haunted type feeling with these images that really do show the viewer the cold feeling you got in there. The images are edited slightly in lightroom, to up the contrast and clarity, along with adding a vignette to add an old, dirty feel to the shots. I also used a high ISO in the images, not only for the dark rooms but for the others as I felt the grain also added texture and noise to the images. Although I won't be presenting these images as finals, I feel I could of done another book with these images and been as happy with them. If only I could afford it!