Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire
September 19th, 2008
A ruined Cisternian monastery, Fountains Abbey is in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, near Ripon. It dates back as far as 1132 and mostly consists of the outer walls of the abbey, but parts of the ruins are more complete than others. There are still some beautiful architectural features, such as the gargoyles, that adorn the largest tower in the abbey, and a tiled mosaic floor is still very much intact.
It’s quite a spectacular structure and is of some size. You get a real feel for how the building may have looked and operated as you wander around the gardens and grounds. That these remains are almost a thousand years old and still mostly standing really says something about the people who designed and built it back in 1132.
I found shooting Fountains Abbey quite difficult as it was such a vast structure and there was absolutely no way a single image could do it justice. The day I went to visit it was a beautiful one; warm with blue skies and fluffy white clouds. This did ensure that my task of capturing the image was going to be as difficult as possible, as the sun reflected off the pale stone and overexposure came in droves.
Bracketing was the order of the day, and so I shot five bracketed shots and merged these as a HDR image in Photomatix Pro. I wanted to get as much detail out of the image, showing the texture of the walls, the highlights and shadows of the building and so HDR was the only option. Wanting to keep the context of the building, I decided it could make an interesting antiquated image and used Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro plugin in Photoshop to do convert it into a sepia image with a little noise.
I’m quite pleased with the result and think it achieves what I set out to do.
Below is another image captured from the inside of the abbey. This is the monks’ cellarium, where food was kept.
Tagged with architecture, HDR, ruin, sepia
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