<<< o >>>Hagia Sophiacomments & reactions
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This is a shot of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, taken during our recent Faces and Places Photo Tour. It was dedicated in 360, became a cathedral in 562, a mosque in 1453 and then a museum in 1931. As you can see, it's a fabulous building.

As for the image: it was constructed from a three shot hand-held sequence (take a look at the original to see all three exposures) then merged in Photoshop. I did try producing an HDR image (using Photomatix Pro) but couldn't produce anything I was especially happy with so reverted to manually blending the three exposures then applying a rather large range of selective adjustments to different areas of the image. It's still not ideal – I could have done with at least one more image to capture the very brightest highlights – but I am reasonably pleased with how it turned out.

Let me know what you think.

On a different matter: today's your last chance to get a 20% discount on our online photography and post-production tutorials, so grab yourself a bargain while you can :)

captured
camera
lens
focal length
aperture
shutter speed
shooting mode
exposure bias
metering mode
ISO
flash
image quality
RAW converter
image editor
plugins (etc)
cropped?
12.55pm on 9/11/11
Canon 5D Mark II
EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM
16mm
f/5.6
1/8, 1/13, & 1/25
manual
n/a
evaluative
200
no
RAW
Camera Raw
Photoshop CS5
Topaz Detail
minor transformation
 
3x2 + travel [Istanbul, Turkey] + show the original