What might have been

When I was lining up this photograph to post I was hoping that it would be in celebration of Ireland’s passage to the world cup.  I started drafting this post during the match last night and thought it would be appropriate to select a photo taken while watching Ireland play Italy in the penultimate group match last month – a match that we almost won, and which could have seen us avoid last night’s playoff game.  As it turns out, thanks to Thierry Henry, a photograph from a basketball or GAA football game might have been more appropriate. C’est la vie.

There’ll be plenty of blogs to read and videos to watch and photographs to analyze today that will provide coverage on the so-called “hand of frog” incident, so I’m leaving all of that to others – after all, this is a photography blog and not a soccer one.

And so for a moment I’ll turn my attention to the photograph above which is, you will notice, taken with my trusty fisheye lens.  Now I am the first to admit I’m a little addicted to this lens (though, to be fair to myself, less so recently) but a scene like this, with an almost full house at Croke Park and a viewpoint from one of the corporate boxes, is just crying out to be photographed using the lens.

Actually this shot was taken before the game kicked off and in an ideal world, bearing in mind that straight lines going through the centre of a fisheye stay straight while all others bend, I would have been situated right on the half way line to have a nice symmetrical image.

My inital attempts to get a clean exposure proved unsuccessful – even overriding the camera by dialling in exposure compensation, to compensate for the shot being taken into the light from the floodlights on the opposite stand, I struggled to keep detail in the stand below.  The problem being that the dynamic range of the scene, from the shadows to the bright floodlights, was too much for the sensor to handle, and so I took a trio of shots in quick succession at -2, 0 and +2 stops to make a HDR composite in post processing.

It’s not an ideal subject for a HDR as a few thousand people in the stand below the camera seemed to move between the three exposures and so there’s a lot of motion blur in the final image, but it was one way to keep some detail in all areas of the frame, and I tried to process it to look a little more natural than other HDR shots can sometimes look.  Indeed it’s possible to push HDR to an extreme where the resultant image almost looks like a painting.  I have an example of that, together with the image straight from the camera for the sake of comparison, tomorrow.