Local photographer, jazz clarinet virtuoso and poet Barrie Marshall has a keen interest in local buildings and heritage architecture, as his friends at the popular ‘Lancaster Past & Present‘ facebook forum can testify. He has recently posted a series of images captured though broken windows at the old Williamson factory on St George’s Quay, shortly before it was demolished.
In this series, entitled ‘Beauty in Decay‘, Barrie has experimented in tone mapping. Tone mapping usually works by merging multiple images with different exposures into one image. Each image contains details not visible in another. However Barrie has worked from single raw images. The result reveals more intensely visible detail. And some interesting colour effects.
Anyone who wants to meet Barrie will find him every Sunday lunchtime from 12.30 – 3pm at the Robert Gillow, playing trad jazz with the Sun Street Stompers, a friendly gig that has been running for around 20 years now.
You can see the original image series on facebook, where they are larger, by clicking here.
For those who would like an idea of what the original factory looked like, you can watch British Film Institute archive footage of workers (many of them children) leaving the factory in 1901 by clicking here.
