Elgin Cathedral

This 13th C cathedral has seen it's share of fighting, death and destruction, there's a story in the stones which is one of the thing that draws me to sites like this.

I was watching the forecast to find a day with some decent clouds and Thanks to windy.com I managed to time my visit with some lovely, wispy clouds. Of course, there was still strong sunlight and that caused some issues shooting into the sun, but the Olympus 9-18mm is a cheapo marvel, controlling contrast and avoiding hotspots (something that I struggle with on the more expensive 12-40mm when shooting towards the sun).

Technically you could argue that there are blown out highlights on the second image but the histogram shows there is detail there and I quite like the overexposed flare behind a building. It's something Simon Marsden used to great effect.

 

Daviot Church

It was a really grey day so not much inspiration for good images but I thought about the church at Daviot which is pretty close to home and decided to give it a go. This is a well know, iconic church that can be seen from the main A9 when travelling to Inverness.

All the images were processed in lightroom and then I took them into Nik Color Efex where I have a preset simply called Infrared Marsden, which tries to emulate Simon Marsden's grainy, high contrast and glowing images.

 It's remarkable how much detail you can pull out of the clouds, really emphasising the mood of a dull day in a graveyard. Here's the unprocessed version of the above image so you can see the difference!

Unprocessed version