Lone Star by GordonThe shot
The view of the lone star in the Rotunda dome of the Capitol building
is a standard postcard image for Austin. I wanted to try and do something
slightly different from the typical 'straight underneath' postcard shot. I took
some outside shots of the dome and almost got arrested by security for taking
shots of a reflection in a car window of the dome (post Sept 11th caution) so I
decided to head inside. I took several shots straight up, centered right under
the star but they weren't very interesting as the composition is very static,
with the star in the center and concentric rings around it.
Reflection shot that got me questioned by security |
Another early attempt |
The typical postcard view |
I decided to try something that would have more depth, with some of the wall
included, leading up to the dome and placing the star more off center as a focal
point for all of the converging lines to lead to. The stone is quite
creamy but I wanted something quite high-key and light so I set the camera in
full manual mode, metered and then overexposed by a stop to brighten up the
stonework. The final shot was taken pressed against the wall, holding the camera up on the tripod so that the close in wall would show. I tried to
arrange it to catch the blue of the outside sky as it was an interesting
contrast to the white stone. One of the key techniques I used for this
shot was bracketing. This essentially means taking the same shot at different
exposures, to get a darker or lighter shot than the camera meter might
suggest. The shots below show the effect of bracketing in this
example.
One stop underexposed |
Exposure as metered |
One stop overexposed |
I wanted to get the star at least 'level' but
if I was doing this again I'd orientate things so that the writing was the
correct way around too.
Post processing
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The picture straight from the camera processing software
with no edits. While still quite good it doesn't really have the high-key
and warm nature of the final version. |
Very little processing was done to this, other than further
lightening the shot using the levels command. In some versions the edit
was too white and it started feeling cold so the hard part was to keep some of
the warmth in the shot while keeping the detail and bright blue light.
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This edit is too cold and white. Too much adjustment
with levels has removed all of the warmth that was in the original. |
After playing
with the levels a bit the image was resized down in Photoshop (Image->Resize,
bicubic resampling on and set the dimensions to W480 H 640). I didn't crop
this image at all as I liked it just the way it came out of the camera. I
then sharpened it using an unsharp mask with the settings tweaked until it
looked about right in the preview. It takes a bit of adjustment to get the
sharpening right as different pictures require different amounts, the important
thing being that it has to be done after you resample as the resampling process
tends to average out and slightly blur the image. It's an important step in
getting a good final result.
Original |
Final |
Over adjusted |
The final version. Much warmer and bright than the
original or some of the over edited versions.
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Lone Star