The Four Seasons Hotel at Ten Trinity Square was one of hundreds of locations taking part in this year's Open House event. The building has a remarkable history, having opened as the Port of London Authority headquarters in 1922 and hosting the inaugural assembly of the United Nations in 1946. It was bought in 2007 with the intention of being converted into an upscale hotel, and finally opened this year.
The Open House tour included the awe-inspiring art-deco rotunda and the UN Ballroom, but a part of the building I found particularly captivating was its 1,700-square-metre underground spa. Designed by Joseph Caspari and featuring Roman-inspired columns with warm bronze tones and clean lines, there was something both resplendent and tranquil about this scene that I wanted to try to capture.
Although the tour was moving at a swift pace, I had just enough time to set up a miniature tripod and shoot eight bracketed exposures, and this image was created by blending them using a combination of luminosity masks and gradient masks in Photoshop. The darker exposures were used to recover detail in the highlights along the top of the columns, while the brighter exposures allowed me to bring out details along the edge of the pool with a clean finish. I then used the Pen Tool to isolate the water, the columns and the panels along the ceiling, and blended my brightest exposures into the image using a mixture of linear, radial and reflective gradient masks, enhancing the tonality along each surface in a way that would hopefully convey drama without diminishing the calm atmosphere.
Lifting the water out of the frame and into Nik's Silver Efex Pro, I increased the Highlights structure and lowered the Midtone and Shadow structure, which helped to emphasise the lights reflecting in the water at the same time as the stillness along the pool. After this, I selectively increased the contrast and structure within the pillars, bringing out the texture and soft sparkle of materials that were inspired by minerals mined by the Romans. Finally, these adjustments were set to the Luminosity blend mode so that the scene's original colour would remain despite the changes I'd made to the tonal contrast.
As you'd expect for a location described by the hotel as "the most lavish spa sanctuary in the City of London," the pool was virtually flawless, with only a few minor imperfections along the ground that were easily removed using Content Aware Fill without affecting the pattern beneath the water. The final changes I made were a Selective Colour adjustment to darken the tone of blue within the water, and to add a hint of red into the midtones of the columns and a faint shade of cyan along the ceiling to convey how the colours inside the spa were reflecting along every surface. I was mindful when making these changes that the final image should look and feel as minimal as possible, reflecting both the timelessness of neoclassical architecture and the ambience of a location which, while beyond my price range to visit as a guest, was wonderful to visit as a photographer.
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