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.

At over 100 years old, the Holy Rosary Cathedral must be one of the older buildings in Vancouver. This image shows the main facing window of the church, as seen from Dunsmuir Street. Building was started on the 16th July, 1899 and was completed on the 8th December, 1900. It was, in fact, the second church to be built on the location. Previously an older, wooden church had been built and enlarged but in 1898, the pastor of the church, Father J. M. McGukin decided a larger and permanent church was to be built.

While I would never describe myself as a religious person, I strongly admire the architecture of religious buildings, of all denominations and faiths. I’m always amazed by the effort and detail made to celebrate their varying deities and there’s little denying that some of the greatest religious buildings can be overwhelming in their stature and magnificence.

This church is one of a few buildings in downtown Vancouver that look quite out of place, among the glass and steel of most other buildings. It has detail that is rarely found in modern architecture and certainly wouldn’t look out of place in any town or city in the UK.

I haven’t fully explored the building, nor been inside, but have plans to do so in the near future. I found the detail in this window particularly appealing, even if it is slightly restrained in comparison with some of the great cathedrals found in Europe.

I remember passing this sculpture by a short while ago. My mind was elsewhere and as the bus was passing, the all too familiar shape and positioning of those letters caught my eye. I first remember seeing the formation of these letters on the Rage Against The Machine album Renegades, albeit in a slightly different format. Having seen it, I was determined to capture it on digital celluloid at some point.

Love is a sculpture based on artwork by Robert Indiana, which was originally created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since then, a number of interpretations have been built all over the United States and in a number of other locations around the world.

This sculpture disappeared into the back of my mind for a few months and I don’t recall what sparked my memory but something reminded me of it and so I planned to go and take a couple of shots of it. The problem was, I had no idea where I’d seen it. Well, not quite true. I had a rough idea of where it was.

The first attempt to locate it ended up being a near miss. I walked down the correct road, West Georgia Street, but was shy of a few blocks. The second mission I walked down enough blocks, just on a road parallel to it. Deciding that this was no good, wandering around blindly trying to find the sculpture, I thought I’d do what any sane person would and stick “Love Vancouver” into Google.

Well, obviously that returned several gazillion hits but eventually I narrowed it down to being located near Buschlen Mowatt Galleries. The first photo shoot, I came home only to discover the shots were terrible. The framing was awful and the colour rendition did not present the sculpture in it’s best light.

This evening was a warm and beautiful one and so I thought I’d have a second stab at it and if you ask me, I think it was pretty successful. It was a very bright evening and the surface of the sculpture was incredibly reflective so getting the correct tones was a bit of a task. It wasn’t a perfect result but I got enough colour in that a little post processing brought out the proper colour of the sculpture.

This is my first post and my second HDR image. HDR, high dynamic range, is a technique for generating an image from a number of photographs that vary in their exposure. This produces an image that shows the highlights and shadows in a scene that might not normally be possible with a traditional image.

In the image above of Vancouver, taken from Queen Elizabeth Park, I took five photographs from exactly the same place, on a tripod, but used bracketing* to increase the exposure over the five images. The first image was taken with a -2 exposure compensation to the final image with a +2 exposure compensation. These were then merged together in Photomatix to produce the final image above.

It’s a technique I’m quite interested in at the moment, particularly for late evening/night and landscape shots. HDR images can look fantastic but can also look a little false, with over saturated colours, however if used in the right context, I think this technique can bring out more in an image than would be possible with a single, unprocessed photograph.

* Bracketing is simply the technique of taking several shots of the same subject but with different settings - exposure, white balance, focus or flash. Modern digital cameras have the capability of automatically bracketing and so this is one thing less for the photographer to be concerned with.