Travel Theme: (More Than) Brown

I’ll admit that when I first read Ailsa’s prompt about brown, this post I am writing now is not what I first thought of.  It is kind of interesting isn’t it, how projects you are working on sometime evolve?  One of the places I have been this past week is the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.  It is a beautiful place that I think even if you are not a religious person, you could enjoy the art simply for its beauty.  The interior of the Cathedral has lovely mosaics on the walls, many of them in beautiful earth tones.  This post is about brown though, so I will show you one mosaic panel that had quite a bit of brown in it:

ISO 2000 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/25

The Cathedral is beautiful, coaxing photos out of it is tough.  The first thing I will tell you about getting this photo is that I was on a tour with a group of young people so I didn’t have a lot of time for photography.  I’ll tell you now that my life is full to overflowing and photography has to coexist with the rest of my life.  There are sometimes when I go out just to take photos, this wasn’t one of them.  I’m a pretty firm believer that in fitting in a few photos as frequently as possible will make me a better photographer.  All that to say, this would have been a good time to have a tripod, but I didn’t.  If you look at my settings you will probably guess that this was a pretty low light situation.  I had my ISO really high.  I settled on an f-stop of 7.1 even though a smaller (number) f-stop would have let more light in, the subject was far enough away that it wasn’t in focus. I also have a really slow shutter speed.  Slow enough that it is actually hard to get a sharp image.  In situations like this I think about yoga.  Really, I focus on my breathing, when I am at the height of a deep inhale, I click the shutter, then exhale.

So, I look at the back of my camera and know that I have an image I can work with.  I did edit the image above in Photoshop.  I did shoot in RAW, so first I opened it in Camera Raw, I bumped up the exposure.  I’ll show you the original image below and you can see that it was dark.  Because it was shot it RAW there was a lot of information that could be recovered though, which increasing the exposure did pretty well.  I then chose to put a film filter on it, I use a plug-in to Photoshop to do that.  I choose the Kodak elite chrome 400 setting, because it brought some additional texture to the image.  Then I did some final sharpening in Photoshop.  Here is the original:

ISO 2000 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/25

What do you think? would you have shot it in a different way? or perhaps edited it a different way?  Your comments are welcome below.  If you have written a blog where you faced similar shooting and editing challenges, feel free to leave a link.

Cheers!

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!