Mark Blundell - South London Photographer

London City Panorama

Mark_Blundell — Sun, 27 May 2012 11:21:48 +0000

With the sun setting later and later as summer draws closer its becoming increasing frustrating to get out and do some night shooting. I ventured out to The City last night to have a play and shoot a few panoramas and have a bit of an explore without the hustle and bustle of all the workers about. I was still surprised at how busy it was though, lots of people out in their summer clothes going to various parties and bars.

I’d been gagging for a beer all day myself as the weather was lovely, however I knew that I was driving so had to wait until my return. What I had intended to be a couple of hours ended up being four hours in the end. Well worth it though and the 1.30am beer was very welcome!

The panorama below is from a bridge over London Wall. I’d not noticed it before and provided the perfect vantage point for a shot of Heron Tower. I’m really happy with how this stuck together, its an absolute breeze once the nodal Ninja is setup correctly, the stitching software worked really well and processing from start to finish didn’t take too long at all. I’ve left the tripod in this one as it would have been pretty hard to mask out due to the shadows.

Click the square icon for a full screen version.

Lavoir à Charbon – Mechanised

Mark_Blundell — Sat, 26 May 2012 18:49:34 +0000

The second washerie we went to was a death trap, rusty floors and stairs. However the risk was worth it. The machinery on the top floor was lovely, decaying gracefully. I have no idea what these machines did or how they did it, the paddles look too fragile to actually sort or ‘paddle’ the coal.

This was a fairly hard image to process, the light and dark contrasting quite a bit. I’ve used my usual arsenal of filters from Nik and Photomatix to create the HDR initially from 7 bracketed images.

Residential Panorama No1

Mark_Blundell — Sat, 26 May 2012 17:07:56 +0000

Residential Panorama No2

Mark_Blundell — Sat, 26 May 2012 17:06:35 +0000

]]>

UE Palace – The Acid House

Mark_Blundell — Sat, 19 May 2012 15:08:51 +0000

Here’s one of the most colourful rooms in the UE Palace, its totally bonkers as I am sure you can see. I have no idea what the designers were on when they came up with this Moorish influenced room, but I’ll have a pint of whatever they were on please!

The image was quite hard to process and shoot, bright exterior and dark interior were a challenge as was getting PTGui to line everything up. It was impossible to mask the nadir correctly because of the intricate tiles below my tripod. I’m happy with the results though, not the best pano that I’ve done but worthy of inclusion on merit of the decoration alone!

Italian Hospital A – Bedlam

Mark_Blundell — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:40:23 +0000

High up in the Alps in a small village thee is an abandoned hospital. There are two well known highlights of this location, one is the chapel which is very distinctive, the other is the fact that there are beds remaining in the wards. They’ve seen better days, but none the less its great to see them in situ like this.

It must have been a great place to convalesce, the view from up here was stunning looking down over a beautiful valley and lake.

Click the image for a slightly larger version or to purchase

Hunting Lodge A – Kitchen

Mark_Blundell — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:48:04 +0000

There wasn’t very much left in this kitchen, a couple of sinks and that was about it. I liked the symmetry again and thought the varying textures and pastel shades on the walls would pop nicely when processed so took a bit of time with this one.

Click the image for a slightly larger version or to purchase

I’m still finding it hard to write something substantial about my images at the moment, I have plenty of ideas when I am on my way home from work, or indeed on the way to work, however when I actually get around to posting (sometime near midnight on most days) all of my written creativity is gone. Working long hours at the moment and quite tired most of the time so that doesn’t really helkp matters. Hopefully I’ll come up with some interesting over the next week or two when I’m a bit more chilled out.

Hunting Lodge – Main Stairs

Mark_Blundell — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:58:44 +0000

After seeing where we were going on our day out I did a search to see what to expect and came across the stairs in the lodge. Pretty much everyone who goes here takes this picture and its hard to do something ‘different’ really so I just went with the flow and shot this.

I was trying to pay particular attention to the lines, getting everything as straight as I can and I hope I managed a decent job here.

Click the image to see slightly larger or to purchase.

Hunting Lodge A – Guest WC

Mark_Blundell — Sun, 13 May 2012 18:43:50 +0000

A lot of urbex photographers have a thing about taking shots of the toilets in abandoned locations. I’m not quite sure of why this is, maybe because its sometimes the only furniture that is left as its attached to the walls. Maybe because the white porcelain is quite photogenic or that it sometimes dates a location well due to the style.

Here’s a small part of the WC at the hunting lodge, the whole room was pretty big with wardrobe and a bath with a fully tiled floor, quite impressive given the age of the building.

Click the image for a larger version or to purchase

This was a fairly straight forward image to process, the major difficulty that I had was trying to ensure that everything was parallel, the small square tiles really emphasised any small imperfection with the lens or me not having everything lined up very straight and central.

Abandoned Art – Senso – Fallen Angel

Mark_Blundell — Wed, 09 May 2012 21:43:42 +0000

In the warehouse somewhat hidden away was this fantastic piece by Senso, I really like this, the image really jumps out of the wall and the artist has used the environment well, the fallen angel sitting on the switches.

Mark Blundell - South London Photographer

London City Panorama

Lavoir à Charbon – Mechanised

Residential Panorama No1

Residential Panorama No2

UE Palace – The Acid House

Italian Hospital A – Bedlam

Click the image for a slightly larger version or to purchase

Hunting Lodge A – Kitchen

Click the image for a slightly larger version or to purchase

Hunting Lodge – Main Stairs

Click the image to see slightly larger or to purchase.

Hunting Lodge A – Guest WC

Click the image for a larger version or to purchase

Abandoned Art – Senso – Fallen Angel

Click the image to see a slightly larger version or to purchase