In prison…

Not really “in prison” ofcourse… but visiting one of the most significant prisons in the world.

This picture was shot during a father and sons weekend in Ireland in 2015. My brother and me took our father to Dublin for a men’s weekend.

During the weekend we visited loads of places in Dublin, like Temple Bar (our hotel was located in that area), the Guinness museum (with the Gravity Bar), Trinity College (with a great library), the Molly Malone statue and the famous Kilmainham Gaol which is the now closed prison in Dublin. Very interesting but brutal history has taken place within the walls of the prison (wikipedia).

When we entered this great hall, I was overwhelmed by the building and the open space. It was very impressive and no photo would do it justice. I wanted to have as much of the prison on the picture however I did not want any of all the other visitors on the picture. Always a challenge! Therefore, I took my 10 mm lens to get as much of the building and pointed it upwards just under the main stairs. The iron construction of the stairs and the walkway had to be in the photo, but also the amount of cells and the form. As this is just the half of the prison, you could imagine the other half. Because it was quite dark, I had to go for a lower F-number as I did not want to bring up the ISO that much because of the grainy result. The exposure was pretty long to do the shoot from the hand so I had to keep very still during the shoot.

Although I was pretty happy with the result, in color it just did not do justice of the atmosphere of the prison when thinking of its heritage. Consequently I converted the picture into a black and white photo and bumped the darks a bit to show some more details of the stairs. Not too much though, because that would give again a grainy effect.
Visiting this prison was very impressive and with this shot I wanted to convey this feeling!

Camera settings:

Location