Hello there,
Well this weekend we have had a lot of snow and a shot i have always wanted to do was of Worcester Cathedral in the snow.
The long story……
Last night Mrs P and the mother in law went to see Strictly Dancing at the NIA in Birmingham, so JD and Soukie (our kids) went for a sleep over at granddads. That meant that this morning Nikki and I had to go pick them up, and at 5 ish we had to go over my sisters for dinner, so my day was pretty much taken up – looking at the long range forecast I was worried that the snow would all be gone in the next day or so, so decided that I would shoot it at night after we had the kids in bed.
So to tonight, I set off to photograph Worcester Cathedral in the snow, I was hoping for a good bit of falling snow to still be around, but alas, when I got there the snow had stopped, I wanted the snow as it would help light up the sky, I didnt just want it to go black. But I was there so what the hell let shoot away. After the first couple of pictures it was very obvious that capturing the Cathedral in all its glory would be a hard task in one image, so I decided to shoot an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image and blend the layers together. I put my D800 on a tripod and using the Nikon 16-35mm F4 VR lens, (I turned off the image stabilization) as when shooting for 4 – 5 seconds with VR / IS turned on it does very weird things to the images. I shot wide open at F4 at 400 ISO and only shot two different versions of this image. I picked out a spot on the Cathedral where I thought the light was about middle of the road, and used that to set my meter reading by using spot metering. I then took a 5 stop exposure over 5 images, 1 & 2 stops under and 1 & 2 stops over and my metered reading.
I blended them all together in Photoshop using Nik Filters HDR merge pro and this is the result.
Hope you like
I then had to do a fair bit of photo shop to take out the bright red postbox and several bollard from in front of the church.
hope you like.
ciao
dp
