A journey into history

One of Dave Kai Piper’s ongoing projects is chronicling abandoned dwellings in Ireland. He shares his tips for shooting historical buildings with Niall Hampton

From little acorns do mighty oaks grow… here at Digital

Camera, we always recommend having one or more photographic projects in progress at any one time. They’re a great way of honing your skills and developing a style, not to mention keeping motivated if your creative batteries have run low and need recharging.

Photographer Dave Kai Piper has many well-strung bows in his quiver, as a look at his website will attest. And while you’re there, you can also see his photography that documents the ‘forgotten homes’ of Ireland.

While travelling around the countryside on his motorbike or by car, Dave kept coming across derelict cottages and houses; with his initial curiosity piqued, he reached for his camera. Pausing to appreciate these forlorn buildings, and how he could best capture them, Dave built up a series of images collected from various trips to the Emerald Isle – a nation that, as he notes in his blog, “has a deep cultural connection to the land.”

But the land can’t meet the employment needs of everyone in rural communities, so Ireland has seen many young people depart to built-up areas. This migration has helped swell the number of abandoned rural houses to an estimated 230,000, many of which could be restored to habitable standards. Set against this, there are around 6,000 homeless people in Ireland, and Dave hopes that his work documenting these houses will raise awareness of this issue.

“Ireland is a beautiful country with some of the most warm and kind people you’ll find, but this is one aspect of a larger picture,” he says. “There are some deep changes and challenges facing Ireland’s rural population. It’s under threat from modern disadvantages such as slow internet and a lack of work.”

DigitalCamera had hoped to join Dave on another of his visits to Ireland to see at first hand how he approaches this kind of photography, and to discover more about how he developed his visual aesthetic for this type of work. Covid-19 and travel restrictions put paid

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“Take photographs of subjects you like and that you want to learn more about. Documenting things of interest with a camera will naturally draw you in to learn more about them. Once you peel back the layers, you can start to understand what is happening and start to get into it all. Take image you can – never pass up any opportunity to get a photograph.”

“Getting out and about on my motorbike seems to connect me more with the world as it goes past. There seems to be an extra layer of adventure, although when it comes to photography there is an extra cost – keeping things dry and charged up is harder, but there are ways around it…”

The Black Country Living Museum offers photo opportunities galore. To discuss permissions, contact

DIGITAL CAMERA to that, unfortunately, so Dave came up with a viable alternative – a day spent shooting at the Black Country Living Museum. This open-air space in Dudley, near Birmingham, tells the story of how industrialisation transformed this part of England – the country was known as ‘the workshop of the world’ in Victorian times – through displays of industrial environments as they would have looked in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The museum is laid out as a series of areas spanning different points in modern history; many of the buildings were dismantled at other locations, then rebuilt at the BCLM.

“The Black Country Living Museum is like a ready-made film set,” Dave tells me as we take a socially distanced walk around the site. “Rural Ireland has many charms, one of them being a unique aesthetic – especially in places like Kerry or Connemara – that is not so dissimilar to some of the buildings around the BCLM. There is a real, lost-in-time element here that is quite pleasant. When the weather is better, it’s normally picture-perfect.”

Indeed. Despite visiting in the middle of August, the day we had chosen was a washout – if nothing else, it would be a good test of the weather seals on our cameras and lenses. Following a context-establishing browse of the museum’s main exhibition area in the Rolfe Street Building, we inspected the collection of vintage cars that were built in this part of the world before most of the factories, and their historic marques, disappeared.

Pausing at the Racecourse Colliery in the middle of the site, Dave spotted a singlestorey brick building that seemed a good match for one of the abandoned buildings he had photographed in Ireland. This part of the museum is built around an old mine shaft, one of 40 under the BCLM.

Shooting on a tripod-mounted Sigma fp full-frame mirrorless with a Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, Dave started to compose his scene. He has two rules he likes to stick to, so that he can get his horizontals and verticals sorted in-camera (although he’s not averse to correcting them in postproduction afterwards): shoot straight-on to the buildings, to produce a focus inside the frame, or at 45 degrees to them. Checking the image on the rear of the camera, the building could well have been shot in Ireland, given the damp, overcast conditions and puddles standing in the foreground. (Apologies for besmirching the Irish climate.) www.digitalcameraworld.com

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