Someone To Watch Over Me
Old cemeteries are filled with an array of wonderful textures, shapes and shades. Many in this area have long-lived trees which help cast light and shadow in interesting ways. I recently spent an afternoon in a local cemetery capturing some of these elements.
The photo posted here is of the iconic angel statue that is found on many monuments. I’ve captured this same statue before from different perspectives and in different lights but I’ve never captured it in HDR. While I did shoot several frames from other angles on this outing, I was particularly keen to collect a set of brackets that I could process into an HDR image.
This statue faces due west and since the sun was setting the lighting is almost directly in her face. I tried several different vantage points attempting to catch the light falling across her in different ways but given that I couldn’t move either the statue or the sun I wasn’t left with many options. All in all this turned out fairly well as the trees between the sun and the statue acted as a diffuser and softened the shadows.
If you’ve ever really looked at cemetery monuments, they don’t offer much in the way of color variations. This is where tone mapping can really shine! While I didn’t intentionally manipulate the colors available, the simple act of tone mapping does enhance the subtleties that are present and the resulting image can be very interesting.
Post processing was performed in Lightroom 3 with tone mapping in Photomatix 4.
Camera settings: Canon Rebel XS, ISO100, 55mm, f/5.6, 9-exposures @ -/+1EV
