There was an interesting discussion recently on Lightroom Killer Tips blog about ethic of photographing church interiors. It was a particular situation where the tripods were not allowed in the full of tourists NY church and a funny story of deceiving the guard. But the truth be told, churches are perfect for HDR shots. Especially with those colorful stained glass windows, which give incredible patterns of lights. Well, not the case with the church on today’s blog post. It is a fairly old church, about 150 years, but the old windows were renovated (or replaced) less then 50 years ago. Our luck, the doors of the church were open, like in many cases around Poland. It was also completely empty, so nobody was bothered by setting up the tripod or repeated shutter releases. The resulting image has the incredible architectural detail, you can see every single brick making up the columns along main isle. The height of the ceiling was always stunning to me in churches like it, and I couldn’t (and still cannot ) resist staring at the very top, looking at whatever is painted there. And I was always disappointed that they do not read any more sermons from the gallery in the middle on the left.

This was a surprisingly challenging image to prepare for blog. I love the composition, with the cobble stone lied space leading up to the restaurants and cafes filled Old Town Market in Warsaw. And the light star (or two stars) on the right add some interest to the cityscape as well.
But back to problems. It was a wide angle, fisheye shot, so first I wanted to correct the lens distortion a little bit. It usually results in loss of image corners, and the direction of correction this time, it was impossible just to add some space to the canvass to retain it (Photoshop work, for this one). Secondly, the city lights seems to have two different casts- yellow and green. I like the warm light color, but the green cast is driving me nuts. I really wish I used X-Rite passport on those night photos to solve the problem instantly. Lesson learned for next time. Meantime, no White Balance choice looked good enough. I settled for Daylight, and because the image has no whole bunch of different colors, I adjusted the single tones saturation selectively (lowered yellow, and took down aqua and green).

I want to show today an image which would probably look great as HDR, but was not shot this was . The very bright sun just made it impossible to render both sky and the building, but the sun flare was just lovely.
At the same time, the image I shot has a simple silhouette of an interesting old architectural detail. It is a view on the Barbacan, old town walls, in Warsaw.

I liked it, but a the same time I wanted to explore how the image would look like if I went for HDR (or at least used a grad filter). And I remembered the recent tutorial from David Ziser. The trick was – Fill Light all the way, Noise Reduction Color slider all the way.

I did not any other Noise reduction slider. And just look how it smoothed the colors. LR3 just proves that you can in fact recover far more from you seriously underexposed image! I mean, just look at the black original. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the effect. I am not promoting not paying attention to how you expose, not to bracket and such- but you can go back to some older images, and redo them on your computer with just two clicks.
So, which image do you like more? The mysterious silhouette or the full of detail “normal” exposure? Leave a comment below!

I was preparing this image for stock submission this week when I realized it would look great in some kind of duotone. You usually wouldn’t submit an image processed this way to stock, so I worked on a virtual copy for blog. There was just not too much color wise in the image, with grey soil and brown animals. After I turned it into black and white, I adjusted color by color to contrast them. Then I started playing with tint presets in Lightroom and I remembered the Serengeti chocolate preset from David duChemin recent e-book (you can check the review on this blog, too). It looked great, and I just tweaked it a bit to separate the cows form their environment even better.

The Stony Stairs is a name of a very narrow, short street at the Old Town Warsaw. The steep stairs take you down from busy heart of Old Town streets down to the Vistula River. But those stylized lanterns just draw your eyes with the simplicity of shape and the repeating pattern. With the right point of view, they create one entity, like links of the chain.

I already posted an abstract image of the roof gardens on the top of BUW a couple of weeks ago. This time, you can take a broader look at how the space is used. The bridge from which I took this panorama is in the Western side of the garden. If you look from there to the West, you can see the downtown skyline and the Old Town architecture. But when you look East, like here, you see most of the garden landscape, the left bank part of Warsaw and modern construction of the Siekierkowski bridge.

I was browsing through my Lightroom catalog from Worldwide Photowalk, to see if there are any usable images still there, and found this urbanscape. It was taken for an HDR, 5 photos with one step exposure difference, as I wanted to make sure I retain all the detail in the structure of the beautiful thunderstorm clouds, hanging over Rybnik that day. But I felt it needed some more. I played with white balance, and really liked the bluish color in the sky. But it didn’t look that good on the buildings, so I thought how to change it back. After all, local adjustments in Lightroom don’t have the option to change color balance. Well, it turned out that painting yellow was sufficient to bring the worm tones back, where it was necessary. As the afterthought, I painted it on the street lamp which was my subject of the photo. It helped keep it same as the smaller lamp in the back, and connect them together. But most importantly, it really put focus on the lamp up front.

This sign board was one of the few I photographed on our walk around the Old Town in Warsaw. Down on the street it was darker, but the sky was still bright, so there was a lot of contrast. To cheat that range of light, I took several exposures and blended them into HDR. As the image is about shapes, not colors, I turned it into black and white and then worked some more. I added a split tone post-processing, for which I used recipe from “The magic of black and white” by Andrew S. Gibson, which I reviewed on blog yesterday. Post-processed to death? Maybe, but the final effect was worth it.

Walking down the streets of the historical Old Town in Warsaw is a treat both in the great evening light and after it gets dark. Today’s blog image was taken during the evening we met our friends, had dinner and took a long stroll from the Old Town market square to the New Town market square and back to the car. It was a warm summer Sunday, so all the restaurants and cafes were busy, as were the streets filled with people. Although towards the end, most of the places were getting ready to close (believe me, it was not that late!). The stylized lights along the street gave them and the surroundings houses the warm feeling. The churches in the background had their own light, which rendered them white and contrasted them with the dark sky.

I hardly believed it is possible to take a good photo of fish in aquarium. They aquaria are usually kept in dark lit interiors. Plus, you have not only muddy water, but also a layer of glass between lens and your subject. Well, last trip to zoo proved me wrong. The only real problem was keeping the focus in right spot with a wide open lens (f/2.8). At the same time it gave an incredible lack of depth of field, which is really defining this photo. My 30 mm f/1.4 from Sigma finally starts to be a lens of choice, as my success ratio increases. I also placed the lens as close to glass as I could (with hood on) and perpendicular to the aquarium wall. It greatly decreased the reflections of me and other zoo visitors in the frame, and what was left was very easy to clean up in CS5. Overall, my second favorite shot from weekend trip, just after the bird I put on blog last week.