Jerry Snyder
January 2025 - Fonthill Castle
About the Image(s)
My monochrome image for January titled Fonthill Castle is attached. Fonthill Castle is a unique structure built out of concrete by Henry Mercer. The house has 200 windows, all made of concrete, including the grilles around the glass panes. The image was made hand held with a Canon 6D at 35 mm. The exposure settings were 1/40 s., f/4.5, and ISO 100 in manual mode. The image as shot was quite overexposed so a global tonal adjustment was made in Lightroom. The sky was further darkened to keep interest in the main subject. Cropping straightening, and transformation adjustments were made before converting to black and white.
3 comments posted
What an unusual building for the USA. (Or is it?) At first I thought you must have been on holiday over here, but I see it's in Pennsylvania, built in 1908 to 1912. Your picture is far better than the one in Wikipedia! The detail and structure here is very clear. A little added sky detail might have helped the drab one you saw. Posted: 01/06/2025 15:41:09
Unusual building indeed. The first detail I register are the windows which have a lot of impact and I think that is because they have strong blacks and clean whites set against a fairly mid grey building which in itself has a wide range of subtle tones. Considering the overexposure issue in the original you have done a good recovery job. As per Stuart, some sky detail, especially threatening or dramatic would not go astray. The only thing that bothers me (and it is only minor) is the foliage behind the centre of the building (on the sides is fine) so a lower viewpoint or one angled more from the left to hide them with the building may have worked well but that may also have interfered with the perspective. Posted: 01/07/2025 23:27:54
I agree with Chris and would try a sky replacement. I would not want to be in charge of cleaning all those windows! Posted: 01/14/2025 16:10:54