Photo project: Mural capture

My Godparents had us over for a delicious brunch the other weekend and also gave me a photo assignment: to capture the mural their talented son-in-law painted on a wall in their basement. They are moving to a new house, and they want to preserve what they can of this artwork that is obviously very special to them.

My goal here was to simply capture the mural as it really exists. To do that, I applied the HDR technique, which involves taking multiple exposures and combining them to reproduce a larger range of contrast.  What you see below is actually three images: one under-exposed, one exposed properly, and one over-exposed.  I think it helped balance out the lighting in the room and capture extra detail in the shading.

I also boosted the saturation, removed lens distortion caused by the wide angle, fixed discoloration from sunlight coming in on the right, patched lens flares, and sharpened the image.  All this helped make up for what was lost in the digital translation to the camera.

Painting by Erik Lundgren

This was not a big project (not nearly as big as painting it must have been!), but it was an interesting challenge.  I think it will look good printed on canvas, hanging in my aunt and uncle's new house.

Settings on Canon 6D:
- 24mm
- f/10
- 1/2s, 1s, 2s
- ISO 200