Saint Basil Cathedral
I’ve posted a photograph of Moscow’s St.Basil Cathedral before, but I didn’t really give you a lot of information about it at the time. The full name of the cathedral is the Cathedral of Intercession of Theotokos on the Moat and it was built between 1555 and 1561 marking the center of Moscow and commemorating the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan. The strange thing about this cathedral is the fact that there was no other similar Russian building at the time when it was built and even afterwards it was not exactly reproduced in any other city. The Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood located in St.Petersburg was inspired by the St.Basil Cathedral, but the architecture is still quite different.
Although my previous shot of the cathedral was quite impressive because of the strong colours, for the shot below I went on a completely different route with the processing, tone-mapping it first with Photomatix from 5 exposures and then converting it to black and white using an infrared equivalent filter in Photoshop. As always, I would love to hear your comments.
| Posted in » Ready for takeoff
The great thing about having a photoblog is that I can post a picture of pretty much anything and if I don’t know what it is there will always be one reader that comes up with the answer. It was the same with the plane below. When I posted the first photo of it, I wasn’t quite sure what kind of plane it was so I’ve asked the readers. Sure enough, two days later I had my answer. It’s a Pilatus PC-6 “Porter” (pdf link), a plane known for it’s short takeoff and landing capabilities.
As for the shot below it’s an HDR from 7 exposures with a 1E.V. step. I had to blend back in the sky from one of the original exposures as Photomatix tends to make it look very unnatural when you are shooting straight into the sun. If you’re interested in the original shot, please let me know and I will post it in the comments.
JBR on the rocks
Following my other “on the rocks” shot, I thought I’ll start a photo series of landmarks on the rocks because this kind of contrast between rocks washed by the sea and modern skylines always seems to make for a good photograph. I’ve got a couple of other locations in mind for this and hopefuly over the next few months I’ll manage to add to this series.
For those that are not familiar with the Dubai skyline, this is the new Dubai, in particular the Jumeirah Beach Residences (JBR) in Dubai Marina. The Jumeirah Beach Residences is a fairly new development, comprising of a bunch of towers built along the beach close to Palm Jumeirah. I don’t find these towers particularly pretty to look at, but they do make for an interesting skyline.
Clouds passing by
I will try and make this shot the last one of the Burj Al Arab for a while because I imagine some of you are getting tired of seeing the same hotel all the time. The thing is though, this hotel can look very different depending on where you take the shot from and I managed to take this photograph from a new location for me.
I avoided a security guard (I wonder why most interesting photo stories start with this statement?!) and made my way to the construction area at the end of the Burj Al Arab beach where you get a nice view of the hotel with nothing but sea in front of it. Considering I just bought an ND400 filter and the clouds were moving fast above me I decided to take a long exposure shot (30s) that made the water look completely flat and blurred the clouds.
Getting ready
Considering the previous image I posted, I probably should have called this post “From planes to weddings”, but I stopped myself just in time. As you might have guessed already this is a wedding shot. I took this during my assignment in Bangalore, India in December and it’s probably my favourite shot out of the total 6,000 I took during the two traditional weddings I covered there. The natural light coming through the window was just right and I supplemented it with an SB-900 placed off camera to the right. Although I know most of you appreciate landscape photography more, I would love to hear what you think about this one.
