St. Nicholas Church, Old Town Square, Prague

In my last post, I wrote about HDR's ability to bring detail.  The details are always there in the original photo -- HDR doesn't create something from nothing -- but the process can really make them pop.  One of the challenges with this is that it makes it hard to predict how well a picture is going to work as an HDR shot.  It also creates a lot of opportunities for happy accidents.  This photo is of part of the ceiling in an old church in Prague, at which some friends got married.  The whole building is simply stunning.  Unfortunately there's nothing in the frame to give you a sense of scale, so you'll have to take my word for it that  the ceiling is f'ing enormous.  But the photo does enhance the art work tremendously.  When you see this ceiling in real life, the mural is tremendously faded -- beautiful, but indistinct, like a lovely plaster texture rather than actual images.  But the HDR process really brings it out.  So much so, that it's hard to tell where the mural ends and where the fancy molding begins, which is probably the original intent of the artist.  And in that sense I suppose it somewhat compensates for some of the lost grandeur of scale.  Well not really, but it is cool.