Tag - fountains abbey

Sometimes, when I’m on a location and shooting the sights, something will light up in my mind’s eye… an idea for a treatment of the scene in front of me that will have to wait until I can get it in front of me on a screen, in Photoshop.

I had a lot of moments like that during the day I spent at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, England, last October.

The idea for reflecting the “night sky” in pools of water around the abbeys first struck me that night as I was leaving Sweetheart Abbey in Dumfries/Galloway Scotland, and I saw the lamp post reflect in a puddle.

After that, I kept an eye out for similar situations at other locations. And since then, I’ve given a great deal of thought to how I would make the starscape reflect in the puddles. I knew I couldn’t just replace the water with an inverse of the starscape; I’d have to find someway to make it look like it was really reflected in the water.

So it took a lot of trial and error with countless layers, but I think I’m finally seeing what I imagined that afternoon in Yorkshire:

See more from this series at PortalsOfStone.com