Palace Theatre shoot

The History of the Palace Theatre

The Palace Theatre is a disused theatre in Union Street, Plymouth. It opened in 1898 as a music hall but was damaged by fire only three months after opening, and was re-opened in 1899 as the New Palace Theatre of Varieties. In 1961 it was converted to a bingo hall, but later reverted to being a theatre as the Palace Theatre until 1983, when it became The Academy disco and finally operated as the Dance Academy, before being closed after Class A drugs were found on the premises. Now the theatre is being rebuilt but not as fast as the owner or anyone would like to be because the theatre is a grade II listed building so planning permission is very hard. The Palace Theatre is expected to open again in approximately 2020.

The Palace Theatre had asked us down to give us the opportunity of taking pictures of what the disused theatre looks like now it is going through renovation. This gave us a good opportunity to practise our manual HDR skills using the camera, as yesterday we only made HDR images using Camera Raw. Once we had been given a tour around the building and a health and safety talk we didn't actually have that much time to be able to try and take our HDR images as we had to make sure that we got all of our settings correct.

The first room we went to was called the Cinderella Room (pictured above). This is where I took my first set of images to create my HDR image. At first I found it really difficult to get my head around calculating the different f stops but eventually I managed to get my head around it once I had asked for help.

I am glad I had this opportunity because now people are able to see what the theatre looks like now and can see what details they keep in the refurbished Palace Theatre. Since the shoot we have had an email from the people who are linked to the Palace Theatre who knew we were going yesterday and have seen our images and have asked if they can use some of our images to advertise the Palace Theatre. This may not include me but if it does then it is an amazing opportunity for me and I'm glad I did it.