Le musée de l’Armée

May 8th, 2011

Having recently seen a few interesting photographs from France, I remembered about the shots I took over the Christmas period in Paris and particularly the one below. It was not an easy one to process (you will see a very big difference between the original and the final version) as I was shooting right into a very strong winter sun and no matter how many times I tried opening this in Photoshop it never looked quite right.

I shot a bracketed sequence of 7 images (with even the metered one at -2E.V.) and I tried working through the image, blending some of the areas in Photoshop while tone-mapping some other areas in Photomatix. In the end I went with a monotone version and I am fairly happy with the result.

As for the location, this is the courtyard of Le musée de l’Armée (the museum of the Army of France), originally built as a hospital and home for disabled soldiers, which now houses Napoleon’s tomb.

Shot with NIKON D300S | 12mm | ƒ/8

This post belongs to:
Europe, France

Roll-over the photo
to see the original Photography workshop - Night photography

  • http://virtualpoetry.pixyblog.com/ April Pinsonneault

    I love it. Those unhappy feelings we have about our work only make us better at our art. But, from where I am sitting, this is excellent :)

  • http://www.id7.co.uk CSJ @ID7

    The tonality in this image is great, it might be my screen but the dome stands in relief almost 3D on against the sky, looks great!

  • http://michaeltuuk.wordpress.com Michael Tuuk

    Great work on this one!

  • http://www.momentaryawe.com Catalin

    April, Michael thanks!

    CSJ, I didn’t see the 3d bit, but glad you like it :)

  • http://newrealityltd.com/ Video Production Birmingham

    I really like this image, I think the tones are very strong. good work, thanks for sharing!

  • Maha Nasrallah

    Beautiful work Catalin! You’ve turned ordinary into striking in this one!

  • http://www.momentaryawe.com Catalin

    Maha, thank you!