The Story
September 2010. I had moved to the new house a couple months earlier and I remembered that, when I was considering buying this house, I went to google maps to check the surroundings. At that time I saw some abandoned houses nearby and I decided to check them out. I saw in the satellite pictures two candidates at a walking distance from home. I marked them in my photo map and decided to google for some more abandoned houses nearby. I found out that an old palace was in ruins and it was very near from home. This was a Friday evening and the weather forecast for the weekend had some cloudy skies. So I decided that I would go scout these places in the next day.
Saturday, I left home with the gear and walked to the first abandoned house in my list. It was a very small house in a place that had no interest whatsoever so I moved on to the next. The second one didn't inspired me any security: I wasn't even sure if it was abandoned, there were cars parked nearby and it was very isolated. I decided it wasn't worth the risk and walked on to the last one on the list: The Sola's Palace (Palácio do Sola).
When I got there, I saw a big open field adjacent to the main building and decided to walk across it to get some good perspectives on the house. Turned out that the house was on top of a small hill, the open field was over crowded with high weeds and there was no entrances there.
I turned back to the street and tried another entry that led directly to some secondary building of the complex. With all my senses in alert state (you never know what you are going to find in that kind of places) I proceeded to the first room. It had no ceiling, as almost every rooms in the entire complex. This was somehow good as the probability of running onto inhabitants was very low. In the entire complex I saw only about 2/3 rooms with ceiling (one of them had a mattress and that meant someone was living there).
I took a lot of pictures in the whole complex and called it a day.
Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
1/125 second
F/9.0
10 mm
200
Original Photo
Post Processing
This photo was kinda cliche: the 10-20 deformation, the corner alignment, the surrounding trees, the great sky. Maybe that was the reason why it was the fourth to be chosen form that day. The treatment on this one was exactly the same as in the preceding two (Palácio do Sola I and II) and it was meant to be some sort of trilogy. Somehow, this one grew on me as the days went by.
I imported it into Lightroom, and applied the same processing used in Barri Gotic (I created at the time a preset called "JPN - Gothic") as a starting point. Then I adjusted the Vignetting to my like, decreased the Fill Light, increased the Exposure and convert it to Black & White (increased the Greens and the Yellows, decreased the Blues and the Aquas). To compensate the Exposure increment, I added a Graduated Filter to darken the sky a bit. Changed the Point Curve to Strong Contrast, slightly increased the Clarity and decreased the Temperature to 5000. To finalize it, I did some Color Noise Reduction. These were the adjustments made to the first one of the trilogy. For this specific one, I've also increased the Fill Light, the Green Gray Level and the Black Clipping.
Final Photo
Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/Palacio-do-Sola-III-180600139
