Quire, Organ and Nave Winchester Cathedral

I have shot this before on 5x4 Ektachrome, but the West window

highlights had to be sacrificed for the shadow detail in the quire. Now I

have managed to reduce the 12-stop dynamic range of the scene into a

24-bit .JFIF.

...Very natural looking shot of this magnificent cathedral - your processing is excellent, unless told few would recognise this for what it is. The perspective correction has held together remarkably well - I find that combining two or more shots (times the number of bracketing exposures) helps retain image quality for quite large perspective corrections.

A question, I guess you have 9 exposures separated by 1 stop - did you use all of them in the HDR merge or did you find that five exposures separated by 2 stops works just as well? Cheers, RickDB

I shot ten frames a stop apart, but when I came to assemble them I found that I only needed four two stops apart. The result is getting on for what the eye would register, except that the colour balance also varies because the illumination is a mixture of tungsten and sunlight. However, you would only know that the stone floor in the foreground should be a cold grey if you actually stood there.

I have also tried HDR, but Exposure Fusion produces a far more natural result.