St. Bartholomew Dome Interior

I got up at the proverbial oh-dark-thirty Saturday morning to take a 5:30 am bus to Manhattan for a lesson in post-processing workflow with the incomparable Dave Beckerman. Specifically, Dave shared with me his more than two years of using NIK Software's suite of impressive add-ins for Photoshop or Lightroom.

It was a great experience - Dave is very creative and an excellent teacher. If any of you get a chance to spend some time in NYC, try to look him up, or even better, take a lesson from him. You won't be sorry.

After our lesson, I went to St. Bartholomew's on Park Avenue and 51st Street. It's a beautiful Byzantine-style basilica. It's one of those special places where even if think you haven't seen it, you probably have - Hollywood loves it for scenes of high-falutin' weddings. Both the original and the remake of Arthur used St. Bart's for their wedding scenes. The church also had a very big part in the Angelina Jolie film, Salt.

I took several interior shots with a tripod at St. Bart's before a docent came up to me and said that tripods were not allowed. To get this photo of the interior of the dome, I laid my camera flat on its back on a table just underneath the crossing, set it for Automatic Exposure Bracketing, and triggered off the three exposures with my infrared remote shutter release. Back home, I assembled the three exposures using NIK's HDR Effex Pro to get what you see here.

It's very interesting... I could barely make out the detail in the dome, it was that dark. But thanks to 21st-century electronics, our digital sensors just keep sucking up photons until the image processing chip says "enough." And unlike film, long exposures don't suffer from reciprocity failure. What a great world we photographers now live in!

p.s. Sorry about that photo of Russel Brand running out of St. Bart's in his gatkes.

Flag Ladder Foolery

At the carnival the other morning, I found this "flag ladder" lying next to a white trailer. I propped it up against the trailer, noticed the strong shadow, and liked the shapes and colors.

Back in the lab, the deep black shadows my eyes saw turned out to be not-so-deep greyish-blue. The photo at left is about the best I could do by just setting the trailer to white point in the Levels control (I use Photoshop Elements 4, so I don't have access to curves.)

I still wanted to see what my eyes "saw", so I used the polygonal lasso tool to select the shadow areas and make them really black. While I was at it, I lassoed the colored parts of the ladder so as to bring up the white areas.


Here's what the end result looks like. Definitely more dramatic, but did I overdo it? (BTW, the jpg here shows some jaggies along the edges of the black shadow, but in the full-sized image, the edge is very clean.)

What do you think?