Title • the Sagrada Familia

As I mentioned a few entries ago, my major project for the next few months is a book on HDR Photography. It's provisionally titled 'Practical HDR', was commissioned by Ilex Press, and will be published by Focal Press at some point in the 3rd of 4th quarter of 2009. I'll also be running an HDR course for Aspen Photo Workshops in Tampa, Florida, from the 19th of April until the 23rd, and am continuing to run my online HDR course with PPSOP. With all that in mind, I remembered that I'd shot a sequence of images inside the Sagrada Familia when I was Barcelona last September. I did look at them not long after I got back, but decided against processing them, though can't remember why.

Anyway, I decided to take another look at them today and am pleased with how it turned out. I appreciate that it's a Marmite shot ;– i.e. it's the style of HDR shot that people seem to either love or hate – but it's one that will probably make it into the book. And for those of you who are interested: the HDR image was created in Photoshop and then tone mapped with Photomatix Pro (as described in my 2nd HDR tutorial).

As an aside, one of the odd things about HDR images is that the smaller they get, the worse they look. For example, I think this one works really well as a high res' image, and would look good as a fairly large print, but it doesn't look quite as good at the resolution presented here. I've put some 100% crops from the high res' version here:

.../archives/the_sagrada_familia_hr.php

As you can see, while these are obviously crops from an HDR image, the tone mapping doesn't seem quite as unnatural at this higher resolution. If you're interested, I've also put a 2000px x 1333px version here.

As always, let me know what you think, even if you don't like it :-)