I have long wanted to do some urban exploration, and photograph an abandoned building. There is a derelict building near me I’ve often been slightly tempted to explore, but the unknown condition and safety of the building combined with the general illegality of it all means I’ve never given it any sort of serious consideration.
Sometimes in life, however, random opportunities just land on your lap. For reasons I’m not sure I fully understand, I have been asked to photograph a building and its progress from derelict husk to completed and inhabited structure, alongside friend and infrequent but longtime collaborator Catherine.
This is a project that will take place over more than a year (I’m a bit hazy still on when it’s due to be completed, if I’m honest). The idea is we will be there to take pictures from the same spot at various points over the year to create a timelapse of the progress, as well as some more artistic shots which, truth be told, are more for our amusement, but they may choose to use them as decorative as well.
Last month, we did our first tour of the building. This was an opportunity to explore the building and get an eye for places we could reliably take timelapses, but more importantly take some creative shots of our own before we needed to concentrate on the photographs we had been invited there to take.
From the off: the building wasn’t actually abandoned. It was technically occupied, albeit by a couple of security guards who monitored the site. Which means there was a makeshift reception desk to sign in at.
The first thing we spotted when we walked in was a lift shaft, which ran the height of the building.
Nothing like starting with a challenge. For a start, it was pretty nerve racking holding a pretty expensive camera/lens combo out over a void which, as you will see in the next image, was full of water. Add to that it was lit only by a small hole in the roof (which is presumably where the water came from) and the ambient light bouncing in from the floors above, themselves mostly only lit by whatever light was coming in through the windows. And finally I decided to shoot at f/8 for a deeper depth of field and to get a bit of a star pattern on the light source in the centre of the frame. All of which means my camera needed to pull off an ISO of 25600 to even achieve a shutter speed of 1/40th of a second. I normally shoot in Auto ISO mode these days, and I believe 25600 is my current cap in that mode.
Shooting in an ISO that high did mean there was a bit of noise in the image. Frankly, it wasn’t actually that bad – my old 60D was certainly no better when shooting at its maximum of 6400 – but I still decided to put the image though Lightroom’s AI noise reduction to clean it up a bit. I think it may have smoothed off the bricks a little bit, but overall it’s a nice result, and I’m really pleased with the image. Not a bad start.
As you will see as we go though the images in this post, Auto ISO was the hero of the day and made sure I quickly and easily got the shots I was after.
Considering the lift shaft was full of water, I also decided to shoot downwards, to see if I could use the reflection to make it appear longer. It sort-of worked, but there was even less light available.
It presents an altogether different look. I still like it, but not as much as the shot looking upwards. My favourite things about it are actually the lone orange glove floating in the water, and the fact that you can see my shadow in the water.
We started to explore the building. Since the lift shaft was clearly devoid of lifts, we had to use the stairs. Luckily there was a lovely spiralling staircase to get another perspective photograph of.
Look at that, an ISO of only four digits.
We started in the basement, as this is one of the places we were likely to have to do a lot of carefully planned timelapse shots. Like the rest of the building, there were a bunch of lights strung about the place for illumination, but even so, I wouldn’t exactly call the place well-lit. The place had been checked out for hazards and the likes, such as electrical cables that were still live, but frankly when you’re exploring a dark basement of a largely abandoned building, their choice of paint wasn’t exactly reassuring.
I had not been planning on wandering into the middle of a zombie apocalypse on this tour, but here we are.
I liked the way the light – admittedly blown out in the photo above – was illuminating things, so I took a closeup of it.
Some of the warnings were not quite so threatening. In this next shot, I desaturated everything other than the paint to try to emphasise it.
The pipe work was a bit too red, and there was too much rust colouring in the surrounding areas, so my old technique of just desaturating every colour other than red wasn’t going to work. Instead, I used Lightroom’s AI subject selection to create a mask of the text, then created an inverted version. I desaturated the inverted mask, and pushed the saturation of the text mask to emphasise it further.
We walked under a light well. I’ll admit to not doing a great job of getting the frame as square as I liked, so I cheated with the transform feature in Lightroom to get it a bit more uniform.
The basement was a big open space with lots of pillars. This meant lots of opportunities for perspective shots of lines disappearing into the distance.
I have started to play about a lot more with the inbuilt Lightroom presets. Even though I have the Nik Collection, in my opinion it’s not as good as it used to be, and there are quite a few good presets in Lightroom which work to serve the image I’m trying to create. Although the black and white image above was monochromed in Silver Efex, as I always used to do in the past, all of the subsequent ones have been processed using Lightroom’s presets. I’ve also used the presets on images like the one immediately above to add a bit of tonal colour, or pop certain parts of the image. It’s the sort of thing I can sometimes rely on as a crutch when editing, and occasionally worry I’m going too far, but at the same time I do like the results I get. I trust you’ll tell me when I’ve crossed the line.
As we explored the basement, we found the bottom of another light well of some sort, again going all the way up to the roof. Whilst I waited my turn to take a photo, I grabbed a quick snap of Catherine having her go, as I have always loved photographing photographers photographising.
This has again been through Lightroom’s AI noise reduction, which again seems to have smoothed off the bricks a bit.
The light well we were photographing was a bit of a funny shape.
We continued to wander, and came across a slightly more disconcerting sign, that gave no indication as to what exactly it was warning about. Getting a bit experimental when editing, I again used Lightroom’s AI subject detection to highlight everything but the text, and this time I dramatically lowered the exposure of the background. Bit odd, I admit.
This building will eventually have some office spaces in it. Luckily, somebody had already gotten around to setting up a hotdesk.
We continued up the stairs. I stopped to shoot down the stairs when we encountered one particularly dirty set.
This image has had another Lightroom preset applied. I found one that did a nice job of emphasising the brownness and contrast of everything. I also put a similar shot through a monochrome preset which I also really liked the look of.
The upstairs floors were all equally empty, but looked great – they had big windows, lots of peeling paint, and textured floors.
This gave plenty of opportunities for shots of dingy rooms lit mainly by their big windows.
The image above is a HDR merged image, but don’t look at it too closely – I hadn’t intended to make make a HDR shot with these images, so the two exposures that make it up were shot at f/2.8 with different focus points, so if you look in the right places some bits will be in focus right next to bits that aren’t.
I also produced a standard exposure, which I ran a preset on to look like an older photo.
For the most part, I was constantly distracted by the way the light diffused through the windows, and interacted with the paint peeling off the ceilings.
Generally, when editing the pictures I elected to use one of a few presets for the images: [name1] or [name2] to monochrome the images; [name3], which added a rusty, 70s look to the images; and [name4], which added a blueish, 80s sort of feel.
At various points on each floor, there would be spots where there was a hole that went all the way to the top of the building.
Generally it was a cloudy day, softening the light coming through the windows, but sometimes the sun would come out a bit and cast some slightly more shadows.
The windowsills also offered some nice textures. The window fittings were clearly old, if not original.
When the sun came out it changed the lighting, casting more defined shadows on the floor. It added some detail to the floor, which was nice where there was less paint flakes and the likes.
The windows were often a focal point for my framing. Sometimes it helped when I could also frame Catherine in the shot too.
We came across a broken window, with some broken glass and some peeled paint on the windowsill. I edited the photos in a couple of ways: One monochrome emphasising the textures and details, and the other enhancing the blue of the piece of broken glass.
I didn’t want all of my wide shots of the floors of this building to be in monochrome, but it’s hard to argue with the results.
I did at least leave some colour in the picture of this stairwell.
The amount of paint peeling off the ceiling – and therefore scattered on the floor – was a bit variable. Sometimes when there was a lot I liked to use some of the higher contrast monochrome presets.
In some rare places though, I kept the colour – in this shot, I liked the yellow of the lighting.
We came across a few more holes, but this time as we were on the higher floors we were looking down rather than up.
We also saw the other end of the triangular hole we photographed earlier.
I also took a shot of the lift shaft from the top. There wasn’t enough light for the water in the bottom, despite being completely still, to double the length of the shaft with reflections. It only really reflected the hole in the top.
Just before we reached the roof, I switched to my 16mm wide angle lens, which gave an ever so slightly different perspective.
By default, Lightroom likes to enable profile corrections on my images, which end up slightly reducing the wideness of the angle of this lens in order to correct some barrel distortion. Frankly, unless I’m pretty close to something with clear straight lines, I prefer to turn the corrections back off to get the slightly wider angle. You can see a touch of distortion in the image above, but not a lot.
The roof was looking a little the worse for wear. One of the doors was clean off its hinges and a bit smashed. It appears to have been that way for a while.
As we headed inside, I switched to my 85mm macro for some closeups of the textures on offer, like the paint peeling off the ceiling.
This long-faded hint of some colourful paint on one of the windowsills.
As we headed down and out, I blind-fired a shot of the staircase, which came out pretty well considering I didn’t actually compose it in any way.
And with that, we went our separate ways, agreeing to meet up again a month later for another tour, and to more seriously plan the timelapse photographs we need to do.
Now obviously, this wasn’t a true abandoned building. The place had been checked out for hazards first so it was reasonably safe, and it was left empty and cleaned out rather than actually abandoned. I’ve have loved for one of the floors to feature lines of old 1950s desks and ancient, rusty typewriters, but that was never going to be the case in this situation. It was still an amazing thing to get to do and I’m really pleased with the results. I also think it’s pretty clear that if I was still trying to shoot with my EOS 60D, with its maximum ISO of 6400, and my 24-105mm lens with its maximum aperture of f/4, I’d have struggled to get many of the shots I got here in the quality I got them.
And because I skipped over a bunch of photos in my retelling above, here is a gallery with all the images that made the cut.
