Photographing Paddington Fire Station

I’ve passed by Paddington Fire Station a few times now and each time rather admired it’s training tower and wondered if I could get a decent night time image of it, but have never really had the time. Then, before Christmas I was wandering up to Kilburn and had a bit of extra time so decided to see what I could get.

I wandered around the perimeter of the whole site first as I tend to have a habit of stopping at the first spot that looks promising then half an hour later realising there was a better spot just a little bit further on. With this visit I only had time for one image so wanted to make sure it was the right one, though as chance would have it pretty much the first spot was the best.

I usually grab a quick image with my iPhone to check composition and which lens to use, I’ve memorised which zoom factor corresponds to each of my prime lenses and in this case 4.5x, which is my 135mm, worked best.

iPhone test shot of the building

Quite often I’m able to do a quick edit on my phone to judge how well an image is going to come out, but there wasn’t enough variety of light for the phone to get anything out of, so I had to make sure I got the best exposure I could and hope for the best.

The first exposure was 60s at f8 and looked quite good, but from the histogram on the camera I could see there was room for improvement, so I tried a second one of 120s at f10 to give me a little bit more depth of field as well. This one still looked like it could be improved on, so I added another minute to the exposure and was happy with it, basically, plenty of shadow detail and no highlights blowing out.

Straight out of camera image

This looked a lot more promising than the iPhone image as I could see some variety of colour creeping in and guessed that the cool floodlight from one side would come into effect quite nicely.

After tweaking in Lightroom to get the greatest variety of colour, then correcting the verticals, bit more colour work, and a bit of dodging and burning in in Photoshop I ended up with this:

Finished image after processing in Lightroom and Photoshop

I’m very happy with the final image, I expected the right hand side to be cooler, but there’s much more contrast in the concrete than I’d hoped for and I have no idea where the magenta on the core walls came from, but I’m happy that it’s there.

It also demonstrates nicely that I’m rarely completely sure how the final image will turn out, there are too many variables and I’m pushing the colour so far that the least significant thing (such as a car’s tail lights as it passes by) can make a huge difference to the final image. But this is why I’m still enjoying this project and having such fun processing them to see what treasures I can find.