Shooting Gargoyles

This is an odd title for a post I’ll admit. Let me explain.

Funfair Gargoyle + Lensbaby

In need of a photographic theme to run alongside general stock photography, a friend suggested that church gargoyles would be a good subject. As Dorset is packed full of medieval churches, it went into the ‘work in progress’ pile to be added to every time I drove past some likely looking subject.

As a bonus they’re rather gothic looking so they allow a bit of ‘over the top’ processing which would look odd on more conventional subjects. This resulted in the use of darker, less often used layers in Photoshop and some ‘different’ results. The heavily processed ‘look’ isn’t unusual on horror type book covers.

As usual, a Canon 60D, aperture priority, and raw.

This is what I’d expected – using a long telephoto, a Canon 75-300mm. This is so heavily processed I can’t begin to remember how it was done other than ‘lots of layers’!

This was shot with the 15-85mm which was more useful than the 75-300. The converging lines of church tower corners soon proved irresistible – see later.

Lensbaby this time (this one was quite low down). Looks like it’s screaming which I quite liked.

15-85mm. This is more tower than gargoyle as you can see. Can’t resist converging lines. That’s a gargoyle right at the top – I promise.

Finally the most complex one – shot with a lensbaby glass lens, then layered using shots I’d taken of some old stonework specifically as layers (so they came in useful after all).

Hope you like them – they were fun to do and good for posting near Halloween. Without the ‘gargoyle theme’ I’d have walked or driven right past them.