Gloucester Cathedral

New Journal 54 – A road trip


After a couple of weeks of catching up on work that I’d fallen behind on while travelling, I found myself craving adventure again. The road, the sights, the possible photo opportunities, I can’t resist it, even when I have a lot of things I should be getting on with.

While sitting at my desk on Monday, I found myself getting restless. I kept pacing around not concentrating on the boring task I’d given myself. I lay on the floor and asked myself what I’d prefer to be doing, instead. I thought of Gloucester cathedral and Stonehenge, both of which are on the same route from Newcastle.

10 minutes later I acquired a tent from my brother. 10 minutes after that I told Rachel about the plan. She convinced me to wait until Wednesday. I was happy to leave immediately. I’m sure I have a human form of ADHD – it’s great. It means I don’t force myself to do boring

things for too long.

Betsy had a flat tire just before we left. I changed it. It was easy. I was like a professional mechanic. I got grease on my hands and everything.

We spent a few days driving around, enjoying the sights of England for the first real time. Hopefully It will be the first of many trips around our British Isles in the next 2 months. Next stop – a week in Scotland.

Today’s Photo – Gloucester Cathedral

Tomorrow I will publish a tutorial on removing tourists as cleanly as possible from your images. It’s a fairly easy process if you’ve shot your images correctly.

For this image, I found it very important to place as much emphasis on the windows as possible. I did that through initially shooting a dark enough exposure so that windows held information. Then I brightened them as much as possible without losing that information.

This is the first image in a while that I’ve chosen to tone map, using Photomatix. I love the tone map effect on older buildings and churches. It adds an extra dimension to the scene. For landscapes and most cityscapes I almost exclusively use digital blending techniques in Photoshop. In fact, the workflow was more exactly the same as the one I teach in my HDR Tutorial.

Before the Joys of Post-Processing