LightningPaul

Boulogne-sur-Mer, in North of France at the sea, has in the old town a nice cathedral with a beautiful dome. I didn't stay long over there, just enough to make a couple of pictures.


TECH-INFO: I once took images of a beautiful dome (see here) but now I was lucky to have my fish eye lens with me. This was really necessary to capture most of the place. Because of the huge contrast I sat on one of chairs and took seven shots. I pushed my ISO to 500, which still produces acceptable results on my Nikon D200. The longest exposure was 1/3s, therefore a chair and breath holding did the trick of capturing pretty sharp images. A tripod would have been much better but I didn't had one with me. Even if I did, the security would have forbidden me anyway.

During post-processing I used DxO Optics Pro for lens corrections (like softness, CA) and to remove most of the noise due to the high(er) ISO. To merge the shots into HDR I used Photoshop, which does a superb job of aligning the pictures very well. I tone mapped it in Photomatrix Pro and further enhanced it in Photoshop. Using masked adjustment layers of the curves, selective color, brightness/contrast and vibrancy tools, I made the contrast looking like a single capture and I brightened some appealing subjects like the wall paintings.
Finally I cropped it into 30/19 format (= very close to 3/2) to get rid of the upper part behind the curtains.