Police Station, Wick

 


The Building

This is the "new" Police Station at Wick, Caithness which was opened in 2003. It is often difficult researching this type of everyday building for information about its design etc. and this was particularly the case for this one. The one thing I could glean from the Internet was that it was likely constructed by DM Geddes and Sons, Limited who sadly seem to no longer be in business. In desperation, I turned to AI using Bing and asked it who designed this building. For once, the AI admitted that it had no idea (I have had instances in the past where it just randomly picked a famous architect and said the building was their design, when it very obviously wasn't). However, it did suggest ways that I could dig deeper, including searching the planning archives of Highland Council. So, I did search the planning archives and based on that I believe that it was designed by Donald Mackillop Associates, Dingwall as they were the agents on the planning application and the design seems to fit with the preferred style of Donald Mackillop (as described on a website about Scottish architects).

The Police Station is located near the Railway Station in the town, having relocated from their previous location in the town centre. 

The Photograph

We were visiting family in Wick and I wanted to get some photographs whilst I was there. My primary goals were the new High School and a return visit to the Nucleus Nuclear Archive. We were walking back from the High School when we stopped by the Police Station and I could see that it had some potential for a (hopefully) striking looking photograph.

I shot this using my Laowa 15mm f/4.5 shift lens, taking two overlapping images to allow me to be closer in to the building to try to increase the impact of the windows and angles. The weather was reasonably bright and sunny when I took this, which meant that the image had fairly strong shadows because of the directional light (coming from the top LHS).

Once I had opened the image in Photoshop I first removed all of the distracting elements from the building, such as signs and other added items that wouldn’t have been part of the original design. I then made my usual selections based on the whole building, the sky/background and the foreground. In this instance I made a separate selection for the bit of wall on the RHS as I prefer to include that type of background when I can. I also chose to allow the small wall in front of the LHS to show so created a separate selection for it as well.

I always prefer to shoot in bright but slightly overcast conditions as this avoids strong shadows on the buildings and leaves me with a free hand to sculpt the light as I see fit. However, when presented with an image in strong light the only realistic option is to adopt it and work with it. I once tried to remove strong shadows from a building but that ended in disaster (and having to start again from scratch) so I feel I learnt that lesson. In this case, I deliberately excluded the window frame shadows when selecting the glass panes, so the shadows would remain after I apply gradients to the glass. This can also help to retain a 3d look to the windows.

For this image, the main features I wanted to highlight was the large glass frontage, whilst trying to retain the shape so it is obvious that it is a protruding glass box. The roof structure was also an important feature so I have deliberately brightened these using the levels tool before applying gradients to create recession into shadow at the edges. Finally, I really liked the glass bricks on the RHS and I expect this was an important design feature to allow more light into that part of the building, in highlighting the glass bricks I was conscious to acknowledge the strong shadow running across that area but trying to do so with a subtle touch.

For the windows running along the length of the LHS I selected them as one selection and then applied a linear gradient to them to have them brighter towards the centre compared to the edges.

Finally, I worked on the non-glass parts of the building do darken them using gradients and then used my favourite History Brush Dodge and Burn tool to finish off.

I’ve held off sharing this online for a few days as I included this as my final print in a talk I gave yesterday to Lincolnshire Mono Group.

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