The Author – Bart Busschots
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Sep
8
Photo of the Week 29 – St. Mary’s By Night
Filed Under Photography on September 8, 2008 at 12:16 am
St. Mary’s Square is the second quadrangle on the St. Patrick’s College campus. It’s smaller and less well known than St. Joseph’s square. The square was rather controversially re-designed with a very modern water garden a decade or two ago. Personally I love it. I think it’s a great melding of the old with the new. This shot was taken on the central island within the water garden with the largest stone fountain in the left foreground.
In many ways this shot is one of the most extreme I’ve ever taken. The only source of light in the scene is the windows around the square. this lead to a gigantic dynamic range with the interior of the windows needing an exposure of a fraction of a second and the interior of the square requiring an exposure of a few minutes. Bridging this range required combining ten exposures over a range of 9 f stops (1 EV steps from -4 to +5) totalling about 8 minutes into a single HDR image.
[tags]Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland, SPCM, HDR, night, photography[/tags]
Great Shot.
As you know, that square was always my favorite part of the old campus.
This HDR thing seems like a great concept, have being encountering it more and more lately.
Cheers Gar. Love that square too, there’s something very special about it.
As for HDR, I see it abused a lot, but it opens up so many possibilities that just wouldn’t be possible without it.
Bart.
So any good tutorials for HDR?
I assume that a lot of the work can be done in GIMP?
Hi Gar,
I don’t actually think the GIMP will be much help here. You could use it to do some processing on the HDR after you’d assembled it but I haven’t yet come across a way of using the GIMP to do the actual HDR compilation. There’s lots of options though, PhotoMatrix is popular, but I use Bracketeer because it’s cheap! I then process the composed HDR in iPhoto. I do the vast majority of my image processing in iPhoto actually. This is the technique I use: http://www.bartbusschots.ie/blog/?p=744
Bart.