The Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich is one of the most famous Universities in Germany and I would think one of the most beautiful. Very famous is the “Lichthof” of the main building with columns, arches, dom , stairs and sitting statues. The lighting of this hall is very nice and shallow and gives this place a majestic atmosphere. Because it is so big it is almost impossible to capture this scene with one shot. I spend approx. 20 min to capture this scene and the following photo. I hope you like it.
Because of the wide spectrum of this shot, I need to do several shots. Although I used a 18mm lens with a lens adapter .45 (–> 9mm) I shot four different scene three times (+-2*EV). Typical mistake I make often in such situations is not capturing enough with my single shots. Especially the corners gets later strong distorted in the merging process, which makes a rectangular crop hard. Thus, shot enough “border”. Here you see my four raw scene as starting point.
The next thing is to merge the three exposures to an HDR. I found it quite often challenging to merge already post-processed HDRs, because the corner colors often do not fit very well anymore between the different shots. Therefore, I process the three exposures in a DRI process. I will explain that in detail in a later post, but for now it means to stack three exposures in layered photoshop image and blend them together manually. The result is a relative “dull” 16bit image.
The I merge the three images with photoshop to one big image and post-processes it a single image HDR (“faked HDR”) with in usually HDR processing steps (see HDR-Process of “Back Bay from a Roof Deck”). I also want to have people on the stairs and in the hall, therefore I waited and make a few long exposure shots. Finally, I blended the different individuals into my final image.
I hope you like the result (I keep the corner uncroped to not destroy to much of the image). If you have any add on or critique on my technique, please let me know.
Werner
Another point of view:
