Looking Up

The original photo for this post I took almost a year ago, and have been tinkering with off and on ever since. It was taken with my wide angle lens which is an 11-22mm lens. The lens was purchased for two reasons, one is for landscape purposes. Wide angle lenses can deliver sweeping landscape shots.  The other reason was for shots like this one below. The lens made it possible for me stand inside Holyrood Abbey and get a lot of the interior in one shot:

ISO 800 10mm f/13 1/500sec

In this case, it almost looks like I’m shooting from below the Abbey. The first edit I chose to convert to black and white, but I kept a lot of the blue tones in.  It was a beautiful, almost blindingly blue day. So painfully blue, that for my first color version I toned the blues down by dropping the vibrancy:

ISO 800 10mm f/13 1/500sec

When I revisited the edit later, I added some warmth by increasing the yellow tones:

ISO 800 10mm f/13 1/500sec

I’m still not sure here, there are things I like about each of the edits and things I don’t, so your opinion is welcome below in the comments.

A bit of an aside, but in case you are wondering the Queen is at Holyrood this week:

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Day 1 of #HolyroodWeek: The Queen is welcomed to the Palace of Holyroodhouse with a Guard of Honour from the Balaklava Company, The Argyll and Sunderland Highlanders, 5th Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland (5 SCOTS), ahead of the traditional 'Ceremony of the Keys'. The Ceremony is a very ancient ritual that happens every time the Sovereign visits the City. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh presents The Queen with the keys of the City, who then returns the keys and says: "I return these keys, being perfectly convinced that they cannot be placed in better hands than those of the Lord Provost and Councillors of my good City of Edinburgh".

A post shared by The Royal Family (@theroyalfamily) on Jul 2, 2018 at 11:53am PDT

Cheers!

Added to A Photo A Week Challenge.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Serene

A recent trip to Rome gave me the opportunity to visit Montecassino Abbey.

ISO 250 22mm f/9.0 1/800

That’s it up on the hill. The Abbey was founded by St. Benedict and is beautiful with stunning views.  This image was taken at the nearby Polish War Cemetery. The calm, serene image that I have above makes the destruction of WWII and the fighting that took place here almost unimaginable. It was so quiet while I was here, peaceful.

I used a wide angle 11-22mm lens to capture this scene. I like that lens for landscape shots like this one, it helps bring a sense of expansiveness to the image. It was very bright that day, so I took a few exposures.  In Photoshop, I merged two of them into a single HDR image.  I find that HDR is sometimes a good way to create an image that has a good final exposure, meaning that I haven’t lost to much detail in either the dark or light spots in the image.  Other than that, I let the image stand on it’s own.  It was a bit hazy that day, and I haven’t attempted to take that out of the photo.

For me, this was a peaceful, quiet moment. You will have to tell me if that is the kind of feeling it evokes for you? Feel free to comment below.

While we are on the topic of serenity, I’ll tell you my life at the moment is anything but.  It’s a good thing though, just somewhat full to overflowing.  I have the opportunity to do several unique and exciting things over the next few weeks, so I have decided to take a break from blogging. I will be back mid to late January, so I’d like to take this moment to wish all of you a serene and peaceful holiday season and all my best to you for the coming year. Thank you for reading.

Cheers!