Portal de La Paz, Critique please

[clrsky58]

Greetings. I am new to this group and fairly new to interior photography. I ask for some good critique of the photo below. It was taken at a mausoleum in Whittier, CA. Because of all the lines and objects, it was difficult to line up the perspective. I am especially wondering about color and contrast...I cranked up both more than I would have for outdoor photography. Also...the open doorway opposite to where I captured the image...the glare was tremendous outside, and it made the area with the fountain look really flat and washed out. Anything to fix that? This was a HDR image. Thanks, nice forum. Hope I got the image size ok for the post here....

[© Tom Cooper]

First a few technical observations:

 

* The photo is slightly tilted.  Not enough to ruin it, but just barely enough for my eye to notice it.  Generally, highly rectangular subjects shot square on need to be perfectly level or the problem will reveal itself.  Related to this is that it appears as though you were standing a few inches (5-10 cm) to the left of the center of the room.

* The exposure is very good - the bright outdoors is not totally washed out, and all but the darkest areas of the interior still have reasonable detail.  This is a case where judiciously applied HDR and tonemapping might have helped, but I think it is fine the way it is.

* The color is good, focus is good, and noise is under control.

 

Asthetically, I am unsure what the main subject is.  The most noticeable thing in the image is the doorway, and there isn't enough detail outside to serve as a main subject (plus, why include all this room if the subject is outside?  For the objects in the room, none of them seem to be the main subject.  If the room itself is the main subject, then the bright light outside the door needs to be brought under control somehow.

 

Tom

[kenfowkes]

Greetings clrsky58 and welcome to this forum.  For my tastes, you have the interior looking very good.  In particular, the stained glass windows stand out quite nicely even though the room is light enough to see the interior clearly.  Tom already mentioned the tilt, but there is also some distortion.  If you adjust the tilt so that the horizontals at the top are perfectly horizontal, the verticals close to the right edge will no longer be vertical.  I don't do a lot of architectural photography, but my understanding is that you have to be very precise to avoid problems like this.  The strong horizontal and vertical elements close to the edges of the frame draw attention to every discrepancy. I think this can be corrected using the manual lens transformation correction controls in Lightroom, if you have it.

If you had moved slightly to the right, the exterior arch would have been centered in the doorway but I believe the fountain would have been less centered in the dark rectangle behind it.  I think this is a slight flaw in the construction of the mausoleum and I suspect the architect would not have been pleased.  Because the fountain is bright and fits so precisely between the sides of that dark rectangle, I think it makes sense to err on the side of centering the fountain in the rectangle, as you have done.  But because the design you photographed is so obviously organized around symmetry, I think the construction flaws will be a detriment to any photograph like this that attempts to represent the symmetry.

All this brings me to Tom's remarks on the main subject.  For me it is the architectural symmetry, but the view through to the courtyard is definitely what draws my attention because it is in the center and so bright.  I agree with you clrsky58 that it is too washed out, and I don't know how that can be fixed in postprocessing.  It appears to me that your dark exposure was not dark enough.  I would expect you would need to go down something like 7 stops relative to the interior exposure.  An alternative would be to go the other way and just let the glare show.

Speaking of symmetry, I might have adjusted the foreground chairs if nobody official was watching me.  ;-)

Regards!
- KenF

[clrsky58]

Tom and Ken~

 

Thanks a bunch for the good critique...well recieved. When I have time to indulge in photography, I usually work with the outdoors/nature.

 

My main subject was intended to be the symmetry. Looking through the door on the opposite side, I could see a bright stained glass window down a hallyway, and tried to line that up into the shot. Putting a subject withing a subject like that just did not work, especially since the glare on the stonework outside drowned it anyway. I took many shots around the mausoleum there and kept running into trouble getting things lined up even in post processing...what with all the arches and columns....one wall or roof would line up, and a line on the floor would be way off. And some like you say Ken seemed to be structural design of the building itself or how it was decorated.

 

I did up the contrast and color to bring out the "grain" in the interior stonework; and wondered if it distracted.

 

And you are right about the chairs in the foreground Ken :)

 

That is quite a place to walk around in.

 

Thanks again...

 

Christopher 

[Lady GooGoo La La]

One of the things that interior photographers do is to take the photo at twilight so the outdoor light has longer shadows and isn't so harsh, this makes for much less contrast and more equally balance light indoors and out.

Lady GooGoo LaLa

[Kevin Childress]

I do a fair amount of interior work and in my opinion, lens alignment is definitely the toughest part of the job - it can take quite a bit of time and effort to critically evaluate all the lines to get it right. Tom and Ken have made all the observations on the alignment, distortion, etc. And I agree with Ken that Lightroom, and others, have the tools that would straighten up almost all of those edges. Given making those corrections, I'd say that you have a really solid image here.

You mentioned the colors and contrast specifically. On my end the contrast looks good for the interior space ... just strong enough without going over the top. The colors are a tough one to gauge - I struggle with colors as well on my interior work. I don't see anything in your colors that jump out as unrealistic. This is being really picky, but my perception is the chairs in the foreground lean too far toward purple where my perception is they should be more on the red/burgundy side. If it were my image, I'd make local hue adjustments on the chairs for that, but again that's just me being picky.

Regarding the HDR work, I think the interior space strikes a good balance. Again, nothing jumps out as being overly processed. I understand the observations made on the doorway, but I like the balance you have. I use HDR techniques regularly in my interior work and I've photographed a lot of interior spaces where I've "matched" the exterior exposure (through clear windows and open doorways) with the interior, but that isn't always a good thing. Many times "matching" the exposure on the interior and exterior of the scene can make the depth of the image look very flat. If your doorway were exposed to "match" the interior, it would look more like a flat part of the wall and that isn't necessarily desirable.

clrsky58 wrote:

I did up the contrast and color to bring out the "grain" in the interior stonework; and wondered if it distracted.

I'd be interested in what tools you're using for these adjustments. Again, being very picky, I'm a stickler for image quality (sometimes to a fault). Overall your processing has inadvertently introduced quite a bit of color noise. Color noise can be hard to recognize at times, but once you've seen it, it becomes very easy to spot. We mentioned Lightroom earlier. Lightroom is one tool that does a really good job of reducing/removing color noise. In this case, most of your color noise is red. And also in this case, you have a fair amount of red/magenta fringing occurring in places where chromatic aberrations occur. Removing that color noise would also remove most of the red/magenta fringing so you'd be killing two birds with one stone. I could upload a 100% crop screenshot of the areas most affected if it would help you see the color noise on your original image. I won't do this without your permission. 

I like your image - nice work overall!