Maggie's Centre, Nottingham

 


The Building

Built in 2011 and designed by Piers Gough from CZWG this unique building is nestled among trees in the City Hospital grounds in Nottingham. This is one of a number of Maggie's centres around the world, all designed to be bright and uplifting spaces for cancer patients undergoing treatment. 

The Nottingham centre appears to float among the trees and its sense of symmetry and shape create a sense of space and balance.

The Photograph

I had an hour or so after parking up at the hospital and wanted to try for a picture of the Roman Catholic church in Arnold (more on that in a later article I hope). As I headed across the hospital grounds I spotted this highly unusual building nestled in the trees and knew it would make an interesting subject.

The best angle was from the road running alongside which goes up something of an incline, so I shot this from a lower viewpoint giving the building more prominence in the frame. I needed to use the shift mechanism on the lens to keep the verticals straight, but this is quite normal for me so was not a difficulty.

Once in Photoshop I had to do a little bit of clean-up to remove some intruding branches, but this didn't take too long as I am pretty adept at that these days. It was then a case of making selections to allow me to selectively adjust different parts of the building. 

A year ago I would have really struggle to make the selections I needed, but nowadays I use the Pen tool in Photoshop (see my article EDITING - Using the Pen tool to make selections) so the endless curves here didn't worry me unduly. As always, I used a little bit of trial and error to find out what works best for this building as I worked through my selections. 

Once finished, I created a stamp layer (i.e. a new pixel layer over the top of all of the layers) to finish off using the History Brush Dodge and Burn tool as well as some cloning.

Taken with a Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Shift lens on Sony A7RII.

See more of my pictures at my main website.

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