Scott Keegan Photography

This week I’m going to show some of the images I took recently of the Elephant’s Parade that’s happening now in London.  I went out around central London one afternoon last week and just went mad taking pictures of these fantastically coloured guys.

Our first image was taken near Trafalgar Square, that’s Admiralty Arch in the background.  I thought he looked so mellow, staring up at Nelson on his column and generally having a fun time.

I applied a “Dave Hill-ish” preset in LR3 and then added some pop in Topaz Adjust.  Finally I ran the image through the new CS5 to try out the content-aware fill function and it worked a treat!  I removed some stuff from around the base of the elephant, and then removed the flagpole and radio antennas from the top of the arch.  Got to say I’m impressed with the function, but it does take a bit of work and won’t do everything for you.

This is a lovely house in East Sussex, part of which dates from the 15th century.  It was acquired by a businessman named Nathaniel Lloyd in 1909 and he had a 16th century house in a similar style moved from Kent.  The two were combined with new work by the architect Edwin Lutyens to create a much larger house, which was rechristened Great Dixter.  It is a romantic recreation of a medieval manor house, complete with great hall, parlour, solar and yeoman’s hall.  There are also substantial gardens to explore around the house.

The image was taken from the gardens at the rear of the house and processed in Photomatix from 3 images at +1/-1 stops and then tweaked in Lightroom using the adjustment brush tool.

I thought Tintern Abbey was fantastic, although difficult to photograph as there isn’t a lot of space around the site with unobstructed views, unless you’re prepared to hike into the hills, and that’s just not me.

This image was first processed in Photomatix and then had some basic adjustments applied in Lightroom.  I then ran it through Topaz DeNoise to reduce the usual HDR processing artefacts before giving it some ‘pop’ in Topaz Adjust.  Finally I gave it a bit more clarity and sharpening in LR3.

Taken while climbing the 99 steps up to Whitby Abbey.  Processed the file in LR2 and then gave it a bit extra punch using Topaz Adjust v4.

This was taken at the Canal Boat Festival in Little Venice, London during the recent May bank holiday.  It’s a 3 exposure +/- 2 stops HDR which I processed in Photomatix, then tweaked in Lightroom 3 beta 2 and CS5 to test out some of the new functionality.  I don’t normally push my HDR shots this much but the sky was so forbidding (the heavens opened not long after this) that I couldn’t resist it.