A calendar, The 'Rape' of Worcester, and some photos.

 
Hi guys
 
I've recently been involved in helping to put together a calendar for the local charity I do some voluntary work for.
 
A couple of months back, they had the idea of selling a (2014) calendar to raise funds. Each department of the centre would be allocated a page (i.e. a month). On each page would be an image, and a short 'mission statement' about the work they do. They had the idea to manipulate the photographs of the various personnel to make the final images convey the work of each department in a humorous and quirky way.
 
To get the idea off the ground, they've managed to secure sponsorship to cover the cost of printing the calendars, but were looking around and expecting to pay for a photographer to capture the images, and a graphic designer to assemble the images in Photoshop. "I'll give that part of it a go for you" I said, before I had chance to realise just what I was letting myself in for!
 
Anyway, I've been busy beavering away taking photos of the staff and volunteers and creating the images in my humble version of Photoshop Elements. The most difficult part has been visualising the finished images, and then sitting down with each page's designer to assess what can and can't be done within the limits of the image-manipulation software, and then ensuring each person is correctly posed so that the final image will look 'natural', even though they will obviously have been staged. It's getting close to being finished now, and I'll be sure to let you see/buy the finished product once it's completed
 
However, for some of the images, I've been wandering around Worcester with my camera to shoot the backgrounds for some of the images.
 
It wasn't until I started snapping images of Worcester many years ago that I realised just how beautiful our city is, but also how 'hideous' it is in places too.
 
A lot of this architectural ugliness is now present as a direct result of a series of completely disgraceful and unforgiveable planning decisions taken by the City's governing Council in the 1960s and early 70s.
 
This wanton demolition of some truly historic and irreplaceable architecture to make way for 'functional' yet abominable concrete monoliths is now justifiably referred to as The Rape Of Worcester.
 
By far and away the biggest crime was the destruction of England's last remaining Cathedral Lychgate (a covered gateway into the Cathedral grounds where coffins were laid before the ceremony of being buried in the Cathedral graveyard). They knocked it down and built the now infamous 'Lychgate Shopping Centre' on the site.
 
Nearby to the site of the Lychgate, the bulldozers also flattened an old row of shops, one of which was the music shop once owned by Sir Edward Elgar's father. They used the razed ground to build a concrete hotel and multi-story car park on.
 
The only (remotely) saving grace of this decision is that the car park's circular design does allow for the occasional 'abstract' photo:
 

 
 
In 1962, another unbelievable decision was taken allowing the construction of Worcester Technical College. Not only did they allow the buildings to be constructed from concrete, they permitted this monstrosity to be sited alongside the River Severn, smack between the stunning architecture of our 11th century Cathedral (although a religious structure had been on the site since 680AD) and the dominating spire of St Andrews Church (the spire is affectionately referred to by locals as 'The Glover's Needle', in recognition of the City's once thriving glove industry).
 
Here's a shot from the river bridge - although partially hidden by the trees, the college can clearly be seen in the centre of this photo:
 

 
 
Here's a few more shots of the Cathedral:
 

 

 

 
 
And here are a few shots of Laslett's Almshouses.
 
I snapped these photos on the same expedition that I took the photo of the car park above. The poignancy being that these beautiful buildings are less than 200 feet from that car park.
 

 

 

 

 
 
I hope you enjoyed this little bit of our local history, and the photos
 
 

Very nice photos, Steve.  Worcester is indeed beautiful.  
 
It's unfortunate they couldn't hire architects to design the new buildings to be visually compatible with the old ones.  

 
They certainly do Julien - the Lea & Perrins factory is less than two miles from where I'm sat!
 
Jan, if anything, ever since that time the Council have probably moved too far the other way. We have a few dilapidated buildings that aren't really that important historically, and that will never be restored to their former condition, that are just left to rot away because the planners won't give permission to knock them down. They recently built a new shopping mall literally around a 200 year old former hospital that's falling to pieces because half the roof is missing. The only point of interest attached to the building is that it's believed that victims of the bubonic plague were buried beneath it!
 
Still, in view of what happened here, it's probably better that they edge on the side of caution.
 
 
And thanks guys, by the way
 
 
 

Beautiful pics, Steve.
 
I've seen it happen in a few cities where I lived. In Montreal, I used to refer to it as "anarchy-tecture". It almost becomes an art form...
Unfortunate.

Very Nice Steve. The car park could you use an artistic touch of some paint!
 
Paulo, that's a travesty. Hopefully they'll put in a park and not else.

Wonderful shots mate.

 
Thanks all - I'm glad you enjoyed my little tale
 
The photos were all shot in Canon CR2 (RAW) and processed with (the quite incredible) Adobe Lightroom 5. If any of you guys shoot RAW, I think you'll be blown away by just how versatile Lightroom is. I can't compare it with the RAW editing in the full version of Photoshop, but this thing knocks my PS Elements and the Canon DPP software into a cocked hat.
 
Here's another example of the atrocious 60s architecture, this shows the all-concrete Blackfriars Shopping Centre & car park from around 1987:
 

 
 
At least the Council had the common decency to bulldoze it a few years ago and replace it with a car park and bus station that at least someone made a bit of an effort with, they even clad it in tradition bricks and mortar:
 

 
 
 

There's an entire sub-application in PS6 called Camera Raw.  It should be able to tell even what camera you used and have has a template for basic tweaks required for that exact camera.  You can do a LOT of non-destructive things before you ever need to bring PhotoShop up (and many times you don't even need to) - I now do all my scans in RAW to give me the widest range of values as a starting point.
 
These all tie-up together with another application called Bridge which is like a picture manager on steroids - I love the batch applications you can do with this!  I can setup a macro to add a watermark to shop images in PhotoShop then have Bridge process a few hundred at once and then have it change the filenames so I can tell which images have been watermarked.  Very cool!

Cool.  Didn't know that.