Favorite Historic Places
Project Description
"It's not good because it's old; it's old because it's good."—Anonymous
The tools of photography have improved recently, so it has seemed important to me to go back and document some of my favorite old spaces. Historic structures can be displayed now with a different kind of clarity than before. The light areas and dark spots that once stubbornly refused to be captured can be filled with all the detail the designer intended.
The camera is only capable of recording a small percentage of the range of tones we can sense with our eyes. By some calculations, just 5%. With digital capture and judicious use of software, we can pull a little more information away from the scene; enough information to cover the rectangle with a lush level of detail that couldn’t be approximated on a sheet of film; enough to pay greater respect to the original design; enough to call me back to certain places to shoot again—only better this time.
My goal is not to doggedly recreate the original scene. Nor is it to twist the view into a severely personal expression. It’s to select from the possible interpretations one that brings the space to life. The goal is to do each structure justice. To let it speak in its own words from a platform that doesn’t hold it back. And speak they do. And sing. That’s why they’re my favorites.
Union Station
Prior to the 1850’s there was no such thing as a “Union Station” in this country. Competing railroads each had their own stations in a community. Indianapolis was the first place several railroad companies pooled their resources to build one station for all passengers. The concept was so successful it spread quickly until many cities had a Union Station.
The structure that survives today in Indianapolis is not the original of the 1850’s, but its successor, completed in 1888, and designed by Thomas Rodd. The “head house” contains the Grand Hall, a waiting area for train passengers.
This is one of the spaces I wanted to revisit with a camera, a place I wanted to reinterpret with new tools.
If left to my own devices I usually opt for an asymmetrical arrangement of things, but the Grand Hall begs for a symmetrical treatment. It wants to be photographed dead square, level, and straight down the middle of the room. The arches become concentric circles from this angle, like the ripples in a pool, radiating out from the center of the stained glass window.
The 45-foot barrel vaulted ceiling is magnificent, so it gets a lot of real estate in the image, but without a little bit of floor included you lose the sense of scale and the three-story height. Getting it all in with a single wide angle view means settling for some attendant fisheye distortion, so instead several images are stitched together to keep the perspective realistic. Stitching also helps pack in few more pixels, which makes enlargement that much better.
If you compare the single-frame snapshot with the ten-frame final image, you can see how much can be gained with today’s tools. The stained glass window doesn’t even exist in the straight shot. The brightness is too much for a single exposure. It “blows out” completely, reducing the beautiful window to no more than a light at the end of the tunnel.
Extra shots and extra steps in the photography process make sure the window is recorded faithfully. After all, it’s the focal point of the Hall, and it’s not just a round window; it’s a wheel window, with spokes, suggesting the transportation that waits beyond it. The artisans who created it assembled nearly 2,000 pieces of glass to make the 20-foot window. It deserves to be fully represented in the photograph.
The window isn’t the only difference between a straight photo and the final composite image. The dark, murky tones of the interior have been opened up to bring the colors and textures of the hall to life. Brackets are merged, tone curves are cranked, color balance is shifted, and mixed light sources are balanced. It’s remarkable what the wise use of Photoshop can do for an image. Great thanks to Suzi Dibble, my assistant of 13 years, for her Photoshop expertise, taste, and good judgment.
Finally, some of the details were cleaned up. You may have noticed the sprinkler heads in the ceiling disappeared. So did a few other items that were added over the years and contributed little more than clutter to the image.
The original clock face was even replaced with one from a better moment. At 1:50 the hands echo the converging perspective lines in the ceiling. It’s also the classic hand position for displaying a time piece.
Like many of the decisions that go into making an image, the clock change is a very small one. But small improvements have a way of compounding themselves. A couple of sensitive choices make an improved image. A series of them make a different image altogether. The whole really can be more than the sum of its parts.
