For the past couple of weeks myself and a good buddy had been planning to have a look at a disused Victorian underground reservoir simply because it looked like the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings. This plan was cut short when we found all the access points had been sealed shut by quarter of inch thick metal plates and anti-vandal nuts. So, I gave a friend a call to see what activities he was planning for the evening, and made a detour to Reading.
I make no secret of it, I love rooftops. The challenge and the risk that they can present getting on to them is half of the fun of a good urban exploration experience. The photography is simply a secondary activity most of the time. Our first port of call was a soon to be demolished building just outside of one the car-parks in Reading Town centre. Access was achieved via some finely constructed scaffolding made the ascent easy. We spent about an hour up here, everyone grabbing a couple of shots and just enjoying the view for what it was. We then climbed back down to ground level and quickly headed to the nearest Tesco’s for some food.Â
From Tesco’s we then headed left, around a corner and nipped down a rear access road to hit the rooftops of the main high street. We walked, climbed and scrambled the length of the roofs for about 20 minutes before finding an open rooftop work room that provided some heat and a chance to dig my down jacket out.
About a year ago, I read an article about how to use ETTR (expose to the right) to photograph the Milky Way in a light polluted environment by Justin Ng. ETTR is a technique that involves exposing a frame so that most of the tones in an image sit towards the pure white range (right hand side) of the histogram without clipping the highlights. This gives you substantially more shadow data and allows you to bring details out during editing that you could not otherwise see. Whilst your image may appear overexposed, as long as you have not clipped the highlights you can use a couple of editing techniques to bring the image back to a correct exposure but have sufficient data in the file to bring out the dark and shadow tones without too much noise being created. I used this technique on the shot below with the end result of my face looking like a beacon of glowing light. Good times.
We explored the icy roof tops for a little while longer before we headed over to the highest peak in Reading. My friends previous attempts at accessing this area had involved a balancing act on some empty barrels before clambering over the main fence on to a staircase. This time round access was easier and a bit more fun, weaving in and out of walkways and car parks before making the hefty climb up what felt like a million steps. I stopped off on a few floors and each was the same, trashed and dismantled with most signs of previous use removed in prep for demolition. Had I not been so tired I would have grabbed a couple of shots, but it was the shot of Reading train station from an elevation I was after.
2 Comments
Hi my name is Elliot and I am a resident of reading and I to enjoy finding roof tops and you’ve taken some amazing pictures and was wondering if you could tell me how you go to some of these locations
This was a while back. There is an access entrance between Roosters Chicken and Beijing Restraunt on West Street that leads to an access point. No idea if its still open, these shots were from a few years ago now.