ARCHIVE 576 – THEATRE! (MONO + COLOUR)

 

 

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The walls of the Landmark Theatre in Ilfracombe, Devon; 2 Oct 2007.

This theatre in Ilfracombe is highly controversial architecturally.  Its Victorian predecessor caught fire and was demolished – only to be replaced by something bearing a strong resemblance to nothing other than power station cooling towers!  However, if you’re into modern design, photography, etc this is a real stunner.  As a photographer, I enjoy Ilfracombe’s cramped tattiness – so many interesting things to photograph, so wonderful for textural and abstract studies! – but even amidst all of these photo opportunities, this theatre stands quite apart, absolutely unique.

The backdrop here are the walls of the “cooling towers”, and in SEP2 I’ve piled on the contrast and structure, and left them as monochrome.  But I’ve re-introduced some of the green of the palm’s leaves, and vamped that up quite a bit too, so that the greens look sci-fi or artificial.  And then some dark vignetting and edge burning in SEP, to concentrate the viewer on the photo’s interior with its massive walls and patch of living greenery.

And that leaves the whole thing looking – artificial, alien, sci-fi, unworldly, other worldly, you name it!

May 2013: I’ve made a lot of use of SEP2‘s ability to selectively restore colour in black and white images – I think this was the first posted image that I tried this on.  The title means two things of course >>> this is a photo of a theatre, but the photo itself is also theatre.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.

Technique: F6 with 70-300 Nikkor lens; Fuji Provia 400X colour slide film, rated at 1600 ISO; converted to mono, and re-coloured, in Silver Efex Pro 2.

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