Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago

New Journal 17 – And the journey continues

The mysterious dry-lands of the Atacama desert are calling us. We leave in an our on another long (24 hour) bus journey. We’re soon to wave goodbye to Santiago firm in the knowledge that we will be back, sooner rather than later.

The city has everything we love in modern city; beautiful parks, cafes, clean streets and lots of energy. The Chileans here seem relaxed, unlike in London where to pace is set to 100%.

No internet access for 24 hours – after a time away from the tinterwebs,  I always look forward to seeing what’s new in this cyber world we’ve created, especially in the fast paced field of photography.

Today’s NDR Photo – Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago

When shooting vertormas, the task of stitching is made a lot easier if you’re as close to the centre as possible and level. Not only will there be less lens distortion to correct in post, Photoshop will have an easier time in stitching the images together.

Chromatic aberration has a habit of rearing its ugly head in high contrast scenes like this. I’d strongly recommend you preparing the images beforehand in Lightroom or ACR (Enable Lens Profile Corrections & Remove Chromatic Aberration). If you were forced to use a high ISO, lightly removing noise before processing in Photomatix will help you control noise. Excessive noise removal will negatively effect the finer details, so it’s important to find the right balance.

This is the first photo that I’m classing as an NDR, a new way to classify HDR photography that I’ve been discussing with a few others in the world of HDR. NDR stands for Natural Dynamic Range and is an accurate way of describing images that fall into the HDR category but that do not resemble surreal HDR. In essence, an NDR image should be a fairly accurate representation of the original scene, in both distribution of light and rendering of colours.

Before the Joys of Post-Processing