Where the Kings Rest

Taking a break from my recent trilogy of Dubai pictures, today's picture finds us in historic Europe, more specifically the Polish city of Krakow. This is Wawel Cathedral, within the huge Wawel hill grounds, one of the key places for tourists to visit when venturing into this part of Poland. The cathedral is one of the most important historic buildings within Poland, being the burial sight of many Polish kings since the medieval age. More recently, it is also the resting place of Lech Kaczynski and his wife, who were both tragically killed in an air crash on 10th April 2010. He was the President of Poland at the time.

I have mentioned in the last couple of months how I am very influenced recently by the work of Serge Ramelli and Glyn Dewis, and that continues to be the case. Their compositing style of creating pictures has intrigued me to think where I can take a photograph during post-processing, and I have used compositing techniques to complete this picture. Whether you call it a photograph or digital art, does not matter to me.

You can see the original file below and compare the 2 pictures together by clicking on one of them, and then using the arrows to flick between them. The original below is still at the point where I have cropped, adjusted and prepared the file before exporting it to Photoshop. I didn't think it would be a good comparison to compare the finished version with the untouched RAW file.

Although the sky in the original is not bad, it lacks colour or character, so I replaced it with a red evening sky I pictured recently. As you can see, I have also eliminated (in a nice digital way) all the people within the picture. This was probably the most painstaking and pixel level work I have done in Photoshop yet. I then added the birds from a stock photo, carried out some adjustment work in Topaz Clarity, and finally added a colour filter in Nik Color Efex Pro.

I hope everyone is having a nice weekend. I am slightly concerned about the water levels outside my apartment (we are on the ground floor) due to the recent onslaught of rain we have had in England recently. I don't think I remember visiting a shop that sells sandbags, so hopefully it won't come to that. Will be back here on Tuesday with another picture from Dubai.

Bridge to St. Paul's

Ahhh Boxing Day (is it called that anywhere other than the UK?), judging by my friends on Facebook, it should be renamed recovery day. Since I barely drink at all these days, I feel pretty good, it's only a pre-christmas stomach bug that's letting me down a bit. For those who are feeling a bit worse for wear, I hope you had a great time, and that you feel better soon! In general, I hope everyone has had a fantastic Christmas.

As well as Boxing day, it's Thursday, which means I owe you a blog post. Yes it's a little later than usual, I have had a bit of a day on the sofa myself, as we don't get many days like that anymore!

The picture you see was one taken a couple of years ago, when my main camera was a Nikon D90. Sometimes I go back into my photographic archives for inspiration, and come across a photo I want to work on. I often then question why I did nothing about it at the time, but realise that it doesn't really matter. As we grow at our said artistic ability, our inspirations and motivations will always change and develop.

I looked at this picture and knew I wanted to create a black & white image out of it. Although I have black & white photo processing software applications, I nearly always create the black & white image in Lightroom, as I find this does everything I need it to do. The only other feature I thought about adding was a dollop of 'grain' to give a real old photo look, but I preferred the cleaner, modern look. The only other program I used other than Lightroom and Photoshop, was Topaz Adjust, to bring a bit more detail out of the buildings.

This photo has a couple of obvious leading lines towards the magnificent St. Paul's Cathedral, and I have seen other photos from the same perspective, but I was happy to capture the hustle and bustle of the bridge as well.

Until Saturday then (my next blog post), keep having a great Christmas!