Holmes Hotel Renovations From Inside Out

I’ve waited several weeks to shoot this photo yet it is not what I intended when I began.

The original plan was an interior photo, looking out through the windows on the third floor of the Holmes Hotel in Uptown Westerville, with the restoration workers on ladders scraping old paint or applying new to the exterior of the landmark.

I had already taken numerous photos from street level and from the third floor across the street as the building was prepped and painted. What I wanted was a different angle showing Uptown in the background with the painters framed from inside in the windows.

Once inside, which took some leg work, the angles were all wrong. Even with the 14-24mm on the D300, the workers were too close to the windows for a foreground emphasis angle and the third floor level too high to get the cityscape without tilting the camera making the windows keystone. The best angle was leaning out an open window as the painter worked in shadows for a near silhouette.

The image had to be taken in the afternoon because the building owner didn’t open his shop until 2:00 pm which was the earliest I could get the key for the empty third floor offices.

So out the window I leaned, compensating for the shadows and fearing the bright highlights in the full sun by dialing down the exposure. It darkened the shadows a bit but they were recoverable in ACR.