Existing since 1233, known as Ayr Academy since 1796, it moved from the Sandgate to its location on Fort Street in 1800, and was extended in the 1930sRecently, in 2017, a new school was built within Craigie and the Fort Street building was closed, having fallen into disrepair over the years.
Completed in 2021, the building was redeveloped to became Ayr Grammar Primary School.
This was a mixed-use redevelopment, comprising a nursery, primary school, and community arts centre. In addition, it provided a new home for the Ayrshire Archives and Registry, which stores the repositories for historical records and the Ayrshire fine art collection.
It’s quite a big and wide building, and couldn’t be fitted into a single shot (not on my budget anyway), so it was back to photo stitching.
With a fairly standard appearance for an academy of the time, the building has one feature – three sculpted heads on the facade above the entrance.
Surprisingly, there’s not much of an entry for the building on the usual historic sites, and it took a bit of imaginative searching to find any mention of those heads.
Apparently placed there to inspire the academy’s pupils, they are (according to Discovering Ayrshire by John Strawhorn & Ken Andrew) from left to right, I hope:
- James Watt
- Robert Burns
- Sir David Wilkie (Scottish painter)
Closer.
This turned out to be one of those shots I describe politely as ‘irritating’.
As shot, the original is very pale, and lacks contrast.
However, after applying the recommended tools/filters, I nearly always find the result to have TOO much contrast and, in the case of red sandstone type buildings, have turned blue.
Unfortunately, having tried to fix this manually, find it hard to control my eyes, and don’t trust the final colours, while altering the ‘automatic’ corrections is often even worse.
So, I’ve included a before (left) and after (right) version of the heads, although I did reduce the automated effect, which was even harsher to begin with.
I have a third tool, added recently, but which I don’t really know how to control – and only just found out how to alter its effect, but have to use it more to find out what it can do.
I can’t do a triple image comparison, but did let it have a go at the above, and although I don’t really know how to tweak it, think it shows promise.
It’s improved the original image with better contrast and detail (perhaps not so noticeable in the reduced version posted here), but not introduced weird colour variations.
At least it doesn’t make me want to reach for a correction filter to correct the correction filter I just applied!
Secret Scotland 