Scott Keegan Photography

Another HDR image from my recent trip to Boscastle in Cornwall. This is the Minster Church just outside the village and it has to be one of the most beautiful settings for a church I’ve ever seen.

There has apparently been a religious foundation on the site since 500AD, believed to have been established by a Welsh princess now known as St Merthiana. The current buildings date from the mid 19th century after the original Norman church from 1150 and later repairs in 1507 had fallen into bad disrepair.

Take on a recent trip to Cornwall the week before Xmas 2010.

Created from 3 handheld shots at +2/–2 stops and processed in Photomatix, Lightroom and Topaz Adjust.

My wife and I had a lovely break in the village of Boscastle in Cornwall before Xmas and this is a HDR image of some nearby countryside showing traces of just how cold December was in the UK.

This image was processed in Photomatix Pro v4 and LR3 was used to tidy up noise and add a little extra clarity.

I thought this was an amazing piece of natural sculpture made from rocks and plants by some local artists.  I didn’t have to do too much with this image, just some simple cropping and exposure adjustments in Lightroom and then some pop using Topaz Adjust.

A really beautiful National Trust property that’s been well preserved.  Inside the displays give you a great insight into life in the Victorian day, which is when most of the current house dates from, but there’s also a few sections remaining from the original 17th century house.

This is a straightforward panorama from 12 shots, stitched together using the fantastic PTGui application, then processed in Lightroom.

We just had to visit Padstow to try out Rick Stein’s fish & chips, and weren’t disappointed.  His café is down on the docks and is constantly busy, so be prepared to wait.  The food is simple and good and the service is lightning, I think we only had to wait about 5 minutes.  After dinner we had a wander around the bustling dock area, with plenty of eateries and bars.

This image was initially processed in Lightroom with an initial import cleanup, and then run through Topaz Adjust to create the slightly desaturised look.

I loved the position of the castle and the play of colours between the grass, stone , and sky.  It just screamed HDR to me.  The interior of the castle has been really well preserved and the quality of the displays is excellent – well worth a look if you’re ever there.

I processed this image in Photomatix from 3 images shot at +/- 2 stops, then ran it through Topaz Adjust and DeNoise to give it a little more detailed pop and remove the usual HDR noise.  I also had a trial of CS5 running at the time and tried out the new content-aware fill to remove a couple near one of the foreground rocks, and as you can see it works very well.

I’d always wanted to see this amazing place and wasn’t disappointed by its wonderful setting – sadly the tides didn’t work out for us so we couldn’t walk out via the causeway.  A lot of work has been done to the gardens around the bottom of the mount making them a nice place to wander for an hour or so, while the castle has been well preserved with really interesting displays about life there over the years.

The light was very strong and overhead on the day I visited, really blasting out a lot of the highlights in many of the images I took.  I decided to follow a similar theme to some of my other recent images and process this with a slightly washed-out but highly detailed look.  After an initial import cleanup in Lightroom I ran the image through Topaz Adjust to give it the detailed but neutral look, then used Topaz DeNoise to remove the artefacts created by the adjustment.

Boscastle is a small port and fishing village on the north Cornwall coast, quite near to Tintagel.  This image was taken from one of the harbour walls built in the 16th century and processed using Lightroom for basic exposure and white balance tweaks.  I then ran it through Topaz Adjust to achieve the slightly desaturated effect.

This image shows Port Isaac’s harbour and most of the village.  I processed this image in Lightroom 2.7 first, applying a crop and basic exposure adjustments.  I then ran it through Topaz Adjust to give it a slight HDR look, before finally applying some saturation and sharpening in Lightroom.