Photos

The daylight was struggling to maintain the last occupied positions, however the clouds and the vanishing sun were constantly improving at finding more and more reasonable counterarguments. Having observed this battle, I was surprised by one of the final blasts the daylight was able to deliver. Immediately, the clouds began to reinforce, and the fight seemed to approach to its logical end... My grand companion, however, remained absolutely calm and did not seem to express any emotions at all - it was obvious that the battle would resume as soon as the sun changes its mind, yet again. At least he could remember that happening every day. It was difficult to say how long that battle has already been lasting, but my companion had never uttered a word. Ever. Because stone domes don't speak.

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Technical update (Jan 31, 2008): perhaps, I should have included that portion of description right from the beginning, so I am doing that now. The lighting conditions of this scene were very complicated - there were a lot of clouds on the sky, therefore one could not see much in the shadows. However, at the exact moment I took this shot, the sun was very bright, and that created even a greater difference of the dynamic diapason. Given the very bright sun light in the central area, when I looked at the scene, my first natural reaction was to "decrease the exposure" -- I could only squint at the temple, and thus distinguish small details only in that central area of the scene without compromising the focus.

When I was processing this shot, my first attempt was to follow the conventional way -- perhaps, use the mild form of HDR, provide more light in the shadows, look for extra sharpness and so on. In the end, the resulting shot was technically good, but really far from the way I remembered it. It was more "conventionally" beautiful but with a completely different mood. Therefore, I decided to do my best to reproduce the narrow angle of sight with crisper details (given the bright sun in the center), very unusual ambient lighting and some haze in the air. Shadows were the easiest part of this experiment -- I did not have to do much there. In the end, some may argue that the image became too dark, or it may lack sharpness. However, it is now very close to the state I really saw it, and I am very happy now I did not post the original, "conventional" version of post-processing of this shot.