Urbex Photo Essay – Furhouse Manor

Posted by Tim Knifton in Photo Essays, Urbex | 4 comments

This derelict manor house in England is an Urbexer’s paradise.

This place was a real time capsule and lay untouched for many years. The beauty of decay was evident as we wandered around each room with the whispered sounds of “wow” as we literally couldn’t believe what we were seeing. A real sense of eerieness hung over the entire morning.

Many rooms were decaying and lacked basic facilities (such as a roof or a floor) some were off limits and others required a climb or a crawl to get to. Many rooms on the 1^st floor were decayed right through and the 2^nd floor was unreachable due to natural elements crumbling the foundations. The rooms that were intact included a dining and drawing room, kitchen, music room, bedrooms and a library. The size of the place and the items left behind gave you an idea that this was once a grand manor house.

Each photo was thought out and captured how I wanted. I started the day with the wide angle, moved onto the fisheye and finished with the macro lens. This was 5 hours I wouldn’t forget in a while.

Capture

Even when shooting with a full frame camera that produces minimal noise on higher ISO settings, I still prefer to dial in as lower ISO as possible to minimize further chances of noise or grain. The light on this explore was very poor due to it being an overcast day combined with an early start but I still did not go above ISO 400 with 200 being the average setting on that day. This means that +2 bracket exposure time was mostly 20 to 30 seconds duration but this still doesn’t matter to me when capturing detail while avoiding noise.

As this explore was mostly captured with 5 brackets, a tripod is obviously a necessary tool and a good sturdy one at that.

The whole set of photos are available via my Flickr account if you wish to see more.

Processing

Processing of HDR RAW files was completed through Photomatix HDR 4.2.1. I have no pre-programmed settings on what I am going to produce from each photo. It all depends on the image to how much tonemapping I will use when altering the sliders. My goal is to create something of beauty and interest without distraction.

Sometimes have a set idea in my head on what I want to do with the image and sometimes it just comes to me. I enjoy taking the photos at the time of capture and hope that I have a few keepers as we never know how our photos turn out until we download them. You cannot judge your image from the back of your camera effectively as using your larger screen at home.

I have booked a trip to explore Chernobyl and Pripyat, this will be the subject of a future article when I return from the trip in October.