January Squares: Plague Dragon

The Middle Ages, wow what fun!  In Munich a dragon appeared bringing the plague:

ISO 320 f/7 29mm 1/100 sec

The more enlightened folks in town just washed their hands more frequently, but a dragon does make for a fun story and it’s remembered on the side of City Hall.

It’s an excellent work of art and I thought a square edit would be fun:

ISO 320 f/7 29mm 1/100 sec

In Luminar I dropped the highlights slider and then adjusted the whites, blacks, and luminance sliders. The filter “daydream” was added and dropped to 56%. I picked that filter mostly due to the irony of applying a daydream to the nightmare that was the plague.

The Instagram version is here:

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Plague Dragon. #januarylight #dragon #munich #travel

A post shared by Amy Maranto (@marantophotography) on Jan 27, 2020 at 11:36pm PST

Added to Day 28 of January Squares. It’s at this point that I confess photos for this challenge are supposed to end in “light” and enlightenment is really breaking pushing that rule.

Cheers!

January Squares: Light Up the Room

I assume the ring had some serious bling to be immortalized in a tapestry:

ISO 640 f/2.2 4.15mm 1/17sec

Actually, this tapestry was more likely a remembrance of an important wedding of powerful people or families. Still, I found it a bit humorous. Also, it was absolutely beautiful, not even the bit of fade of time could obscure that. The tapestry is hung at the Munich Residence.

For the square edit, in Luminar I boosted the Luminance a bit and then added the look, Metro Tokyo 3 Faded:

ISO 640 f/2.2 4.15mm 1/17sec

With this edit, I am imagining some of what I think would have been the original lustre.

The Instagram version is here:

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Bling. #januarylight #tapestry #munich

A post shared by Amy Maranto (@marantophotography) on Jan 7, 2020 at 10:51pm PST

Added to Day 8 of January Squares.

Cheers!

In the Light and in the Dark

Recently in Munich, I had the opportunity to visit the Residence Museum. The oldest room in the residence is the Antiquarium, built between 1568-71.  You know you have a lot of antique sculptures when you commission a 66-meter long hall to house them. Might sound like a bit of an over the top extravagance, but Duke Albrecht V did it with style in my opinion. This was a favorite stop of mine on the tour of the museum:

ISO 800 f/11 1/250sec 21mm

This room was filled with many beautiful things, but what I enjoyed photographing was the play between the light and dark spaces. There was a lot of interesting potential in this room in addition to the beautiful objects. Here is my interpretation of the file above:

ISO 800 f/11 1/250sec 21mm

I started with a crop that would maintain some of the arches and some of the darker spaces. I brought the shadows up a bit, particularly in the wall detail. I added filters that would increase the warmth and dreamy feel of the light in the room. For me, this edit was a lot of back and forth with the various sliders, until I came up with a combination that I liked.

What do you think of the edit? Can you imagine owning so much art that you would have to build entire rooms to display it? I have a hard time wrapping my head around that idea, I suspect I would loan items like that to museums or something.  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Silhouettes.