Old Street, London Wood Carving Restoration

I chose the above image to head this piece partly because it was over the road from the frontage with the wood carving restoration and partly as an exercise involving the removal of people by using three handheld shots and a Photoshop technique that only used the parts of the image which were present in all of the shots I took. Since the cyclist and pedestrians were not present in all of the three shots I took, the technique only displayed the static element – CHANGE.

The technique involving Smart Objects and a procedure known as Median within the Stack Order allows a photographer faced with trying to capture a shot where the traffic of pedestrians or vehicles is constant yet it is necessary to capture a scene that is uncluttered and no single shot is without something or someone covering some part.

I had made good time on my way to visit a Clerkenwell photographer who was awaiting my arrival to help him with his installation of a new Mac and bring him up to speed with Lightroom 4 having skipped all the earlier versions and wanted to ease the transition from Photoshop. So grabbing a few images to use was helpful, and from a personal standpoint I was interested in a frontage of a building where they were restoring some exquisite wood carving that had somehow managed to escape annihilation from the ravages of World War II.

I have had to resort to creating the gallery of just three shots by hand-coding, because the smallest number of images that Lightroom offers is a grid of three by three images; but against all odds I succeeded, and despite frustration along the way, it was satisfying to achieve.

I had left the crowded Tube carriage and stepped up the ramp to Old Street at literally 08-59! I then headed along the north side towards Clerkenwell and soon came across a man cleaning up some incredible wood carving to a frontage from a long gone era. I am presuming it had been covered in black paint for the better half of the 20th Century, and except for the bottoms of the timber, was in excellent condition – the workmanship was outstanding, and entirely unexpected, yet this was a route along which I had travelled earlier in my career, many hundreds of times without ever noticing it.

I know nothing of what the building was, but considering how heavily bombed this area was during the Second World War, I was astounded that it had survived in such condition. I found it very reminiscent of Grinling Gibbons, and later that day I was to see work of this man twice more in two different photographers' homes – what a coincidence. Naturally I have absolutely no idea of who did this work or what lay beyond the leaded pains of stained glass, but it has me interested!