Le musée de l’Armée
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.