China is developing fast by means of modernization and urbanization. However, I saw enough evidence of those, and really hope to find the traditional cultural side of China. During a short trip to China in late November, I visited couple of well preserved ancient towns, Xitang is one of them.
I brought my Canon 5D, and 3 lenses: Canon 24-70mm, 70-200mm, and Sigma 8mm fisheye. It's a day-time visit to Xitang, The Sun is strong and shadow is harsh, the actual dynamic range is beyond the camera sensor's capability for a single well exposed image. You have to either sacrifice the highlight detail or shadow detail (The structures on the left bank would have been very dark if the structures on the right bank are exposed correctly). But this is the perfect opportunity to try out High Dynamic Range image, standing on a bridge, with camera on the tripod and focal length of 24mm, I made total of 7 exposures at with 1 stop difference on each. The darkest exposure shows the shadow detail and the lightest exposure shows the highlight detail of the sky.
At home, I imported all 7 exposures into Photomatix Pro, created a HDR image, then processed it through detail enhancer, and brought it back to photoshop and made some curves tweak, here you go. This is the final image.
William Yu
www.chinaphotoworkshop.com
