While my parents were visiting at Christmas we visited Poznanski’s Palace. No royalty ever lived here, the palace was built as a status symbol by one of the industrialists that lived in the city, Izreal Poznanski. While walking around my mum fell in love with the peacock on top of the fireplace. With her smartphone and using the voice commands we managed to get an ok shot of the stained glass design. My mum also asked me to take a picture “because your camera is better.”. I went for a wider shot to have the whole fireplace in the frame.
32bit HDR Processed in Lightroom ISO1250 24mm f4.0 1/25 sec
I had to use a 32bit HDR to get all the tones in the scene, as a single capture just didn’t have the dynamic range. One of the major headaches with this picture was the mixed lighting; soft daylight coming through netted curtains and tungsten light coming from several wall lamps and chandelier, also with the peacock stained glass being lit from behind .
To get the deep tones of the polished wood and help correct the light balance issues I used cross processing colour profile and played around with the light balance to get the right tones. From there I made a few global adjustments to have overall tone I wanted and then local adjustments to bring out details.
Let me know what you think or any questions you might have in the comment box below.
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It’s gorgeous. Did you use a tripod?
I actually didn’t use a tripod but rested my back against a table while crouched and tucked my arms into my body. I have found doing this means I can get away with slight longer exposures than I would recommend when shooting without a tripod.
Wow! That’s impressive. I’ll have to try that.
When you are need a few stops more in exposure it can really help but not as good as a tripod.
Good to know.
I’ve read a few of your posts and I think you’ve got a lot of good information and tips. I’m using lightroom now. .. Haven’t graduated to Photoshop yet. ..I’ll be watching for more on your digital darkroom series!
The idea is for the digital lightroom series to be published on Tuesdays. I hope to see more of each others work in the future.
It’s so ornate, was it ever used?
I am not sure but I would say yes at some point because we get really cold winters.
We are currently -8 What’s it like there?
We just had snow so the temperature rose again over night but we can be between -10 and -20 until March.
I love the rich, warm tones in your photo. I can see why the peacock appealed to your mother as it appeals to me too.
Thanks Laura, the peacock is great.With a camera it was quite hard to get a shot close up because of the lighting and although we got a shot on the smartphone it really didn’t do it credit. Will have to go back and visit it again.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
So ornate .. Did you do all the processing in Lightroom?
Hi Julie for some reason this comment ended up in my spam folder, I am not sure why. I did the colour processing in Lightroom but to create the 32bit HDR which is the base of the image I used Photoshop Merge to HDR, but you can also use Photomatix as well they have a stand alone app just for creating 32 bit images. This post shows how I create such images .
Thank you! 🙂
Such a beautiful photo of this grand place!
Very nice and low noise even at ISO 1250. I just bought my first ‘full frame’ camera and I’m pumped to see the low light capabilities. We are planning to go to Africa for safari in October and I know I’ll need the low light to track some animals at dusk so I figured the investment was needed early in the year so I could learn to navigate all the controls.
With my camera I can go to 6400 ISO and still get good pictures above this they start to become a bit less usable.
I reduced the noise twice in processing, once before creating the 32 bit file and a second time when editing the 32 bit file. it works quite well and gives me hope for higher ISO HDR images.