The is Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is my second published image of the temple. The first is here, with a bit of background on the temple included. For this shot I chose to emphasize the detail on the stones, and to do so I used a technique I just learned from Justin Balog via Scott Wyden. In the technique, you use Nik’s Silver Efex Pro, a tool for black and white images, to add detail to color images. Click over to Scott’s site and then to Justin’s for the details. The big take-away for me was to set the blending method for two layers – one layer with the black and white Silver Efex Pro effects, and the other layer in color – to Luminosity. I still need to learn more about the Luminosity blend but apparently it allows you to mix the contrast and detail of a black and white photo with a color image and retain the color. As suggested in the video, I painted in the Silver Efex Pro effects to only a portion of the image, specifically the temple stones.
To finish up, I added yet more contrast to the entire image using a Curves adjustment in Aperture. I’m not yet veery familiar with the Curves tool, but I know the s-curve trick for adding contrast, and believe this method is superior to Aperture’s Contrast slider.
Jim Denham
12 Sep 2010Awesome shot Mark. The detail certainly comes out in the stones! Well done.
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James Howe
12 Sep 2010Nice shot, really like the detail. When I was there this place was crawling with people, how did you manage to get a shot with no people?
mark
12 Sep 2010Thanks James. It was about 9;30 am on a very cold weekday in February. The museum wasn’t exactly empty, but a lot less crowded than most times, and I got lucky that this room had nobody in it but the security guards. They were real cooperative. Without me asking, when they saw me shooting they would either duck behind something or move far to the side.