Yesterday I mentioned that last week’s visit to St. Stephen’s Green shopping centre was with the intention of re-taking a photograph that I previously took just after getting my Nikon D300, and that I took with the kit lens. Returning last Thursday evening with my D700 and 24-70mm lens, and after spying on tea drinkers en route, I made my way to the top of the escalator at the western end of the centre to capture what is probably the “standard” photo of this building.
On that first attempt to get the photo you see above, back in 2008, the end result didn’t really work for me. The lighting wasn’t great, I probably hadn’t my (then new) camera fully under my control, and basically the shot just wasn’t a keeper. I did get a shot I liked, compositionally at least, when I directed my view down at the escalators below, but my hopes of getting this often-seen view of the centre were not fulfilled.
I’m happier with the result from last Thursday that you see here. Sure, the composition is centered, but I think in this case it really has to be. Centering it has two benefits – it helps to keep all the lines straight and parallel, but it also speaks to the symmetry of the architecture. It’s held together by the rails of the escalators, and the lines of the walkways around the edges, with the banners, the pillars, the roof trusses, everything leading your eye into what is the centre-piece of the building, and to some extent of the photo – the clock.
You could also accuse the photo of being too busy. But I personally think that’s ok in this case – I’m happy for the viewer to explore the frame, find little details, see the patterns that are all over this building. And it is a busy place visually even when looking at it not through a lens.
Processing-wise, this is my second Aperture 3 image, and it is a blend of four exposures (ranging in two stop increments from 1/30th of a second to 2 seconds) using the Photomatix HDR plug-in which I’m glad to see still works with Aperture 3, though it will require an update for it to work in 64-bit mode. The merge of different exposures (making this a true HDR) results in all the moving objects (i.e. the people) becoming blurred, sometimes beyond recognition. This works in my favour, and indeed my first attempt at a photo of this scene used a slow exposure to achieve similar blurring. I don’t want the people (and no matter how long you wait here there are always people in this particular scene) to dominate the frame or catch the eye, so I was always going to seek out a way to keep them from doing so. The benefit of HDR rather than a single slow exposure is that it also helps retain details across the entire range of hightlights and shadows.
What this web-sized version of the photo perhaps doesn’t do justice to is the level of detail there is in the final image, and all credit for that goes to the fact that on this visit I wasn’t using the kit lens from a D50, but rather one from the complete opposite end of the Nikon range, and one that at f/8, is absolutely fantastically sharp.
Great shot Ronan!
Just one question, maybe stupid: have you used a tripod for the 1/8, 1/2, 2s expositions? Because at 24mm with my not stabilized kit 18-55 it would have been impossible to get that not-blurred result with those times…
Thanks for sharing your pics!
Simone
Thanks Stephanie,
Regarding keeping it steady – no tripod, but I was able to rest it (kind of) on a railing that runs between the two escalators that you see running into the bottom corners. I couldn’t let the camera sit on its own, but was able to brace it against a column that ran to the ceiling so that I could keep it steady for the exposures. Used the intervalometer on the camera to take 9 exposures (-4, -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3, +4 stops) and then in processing used the -3 (1/30s), -1 (1/8s), +1 (1/2s) and +3 (2s) for the merge. The +4 stop (4s) exposure did have shake visible, but I didn’t want it anyway.