Travel Theme: Ripples in Stone

One thing that I like to photograph in my travels, even if I’m not wandering far from home, is cemeteries and other religious spaces.  This particular image is HDR and I shot it at night:

ISO 320 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/5

It was 7pm when I shot this, so the sky was not completely dark yet, but the sun was down.  It was the longer exposure time that helped bring out the blue color of the sky.  The lighting on the statue of Mary meant that I did have to be careful not to have too long of an exposure or I would risk too many blown out areas with no detail.  I put the f-stop to 6.3 because I did want to show the ripples in Mary’s robes, that is one of the reasons that I also chose to make an HDR of this scene.  HDR can be a very powerful tool to capture detail.  I used a tripod to keep my camera steady as I took three exposures.  I used Photomatix to create this image and then did some cropping and sharpening in Aperture.

Have you ever created an HDR image from photos taken at night? how did it go, what challenges did you face? Did you blog about it? if so feel free to leave a link in the comment section below  Other thoughts about night photography or HDR that you want to share? feel free to do so.

This post was written in response to the travel theme over at Where’s My backpack? this week featuring ripples.

Cheers!