Preston Castle
Canon 5D Mark II, 14mm F/2.8 II, f/5.6, 1/800, iso 160
Never one to leave well enough alone, this week I begin a new feature here at the Dream Tomorrow Blog: Black and White Week!
There are multiple story lines here, forgive me while I get a little wordy to explain it all. My friend John Barclay has done some awesome work in really interesting settings like prisons, mental hospitals, and "castles" or manors (like Fonthill). Here is a set of images from Henryton State Hospital. I found myself very taken with these images and wanted to see if I could find something similar in my area.
I came across Preston Castle. You can read the detailed history on their site, but a quick summary is that it was more or less a prison for young boys at the turn of the century. It's now in a state of disrepair, with a foundation attempting to restore it. In its current form, it's sort of a photographers dream.
A few Saturdays ago my friend Stephan, son Nick and I took the pleasant drive to Ione, CA to go on a tour. No tripods allowed. This was a "tourist tour," not a photography tour. It is possible to rent the facility for a group of photographers. So we also viewed our trip as a recon mission to see if we would be interested in doing that.
The other back story is that I chose this shoot for the subject of my second meeting of the Pace Photography Club, the group I joined last month. This month's challenge was "a body of work." Any subject, as long as all 10 images were cohesive and around a theme.
On site that day, I was very intrigued with the building, and its former inhabitants. The building itself is just beautiful. Built in the days of horse drawn wagons. It's amazing what people could do then. We took the tour and the laid back docent was fine with us shooting what we wanted and lingering a bit. We all got some very nice images.
After I had whittled my images down to 10, it struck me that they could be more powerful if shown in Black and White. As Lightroom doesn't have much in the way of interesting B&W presets, I downloaded Nik Software's Silver EFX and used it on my images. I like what it can do.
I'll share one image each day this week.
As for today's image, what I was trying to convey was the sense of foreboding and fear that these young boys would feel as they arrived at Preston. Things were different then, obviously. A state prison for boys aged 7-14. Let the tour begin.
