Don McCullin

McCullin documented war and conflict in Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cyprus, Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Vietnam. After his travels he became the dean of the School at the International Centre of Photography.  In a article in the summer 2009 Aperture magazine – “McCullin rebels against the moniker ‘war photographer.’ He is not content with the impact of his decades’ worth of images, particularly their insufficient role in diminishing the very violence they depict.”

What I particularly liked about his images is how he was able to add drama to his images with clouds. He achieved this by darkening the clouds and adding lots of contrast. He does this on entirely black and white images but I would like to see how this effect would look on colour images. However I would still like to remove some saturation from my clouds to give them the same dark and dramatic feel that his clouds achieved.

In order to do this I needed to select a location that looked ominous from the outside and the shoot had to take place on a cloudy day. I Selected another care home for my shoot. I found The Meadows Care home in Surrey. This purpose built care home was built in 1996 with 24 Bedrooms for both staff and patients. The care home shut its doors in June of 2013 and no official reasoning was given for the closure of this care home. However a family member of a patient staying at this care facility claimed her elderly mother was abused and mistreated at the facility and many people speculate this was the reason for the locations closure.

This location had been wrecked by people, they had smashed the windows, destroyed the roof and broke the walls. This added to the locations sad and eerie feeling. Sadly all the downstairs windows had been sealed up to prevent further damage to the location, This meant there was no natural light for most of my images. Making my images washed out and over exposed due to the flash on my dslr.

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I captured one image outside the care home of a small veranda in the on site garden. I liked the image but it felt boring and like I could make the image far more interesting. After playing with a few basic techniques like editing the colours I came to the conclusion that I wanted to try some more complex manipulation. I did this by giving it a 3D perspective trick. This was done by making the background of the image tilt back looking like a slanted image, then keeping the foreground of the image in the same place. creating the effect that the veranda is standing up out of the image.

These are the images that I used McCullin technique to add drama and suspense by modifying the clouds. This was achieved by creating a gradient filter selecting the area of the clouds and de hazing, removing saturation, lowing exposure and adding contrast. I felt this was the best way to recreate his techniques with colour images.

I also did something similar with the clouds in another image but spent a lot more time in post changing the image and felt this warranted a more in-depth analysis on the image. For this image I followed the same technique as the image above for the clouds. I also tried to add in the effect that light was shining across the image from the sun setting behind the hills behind the trees. I did this by using a gradual vignette from the bottom of the image to give the effect of the light only shining partially on the ground. I also had to progressively highlight parts of the image with a lower saturation and a higher exposure to give the effect of sunlight. I finally finished the whole image off by adding detail to make the image look more tense.

 

Below are the image I chose to edit from this shoot. The majority on the images were captured inside and unintentionally most of them included shatter glass. This was unintentional however I fell was quite fitting as it could symbolise the alleged shattering of the care home after the allegation of patients being mistreated.

Some of the images I particularly liked was the image of the shattered mirror and the spider like web reflection cast upon the wall by my flash, or the close up image of the seat lift instructions captured with a low aperture creating a beautifully crisp foreground and a very blury background.