Tag Archives: quebec

Cathedral Notre Dame, Quebec City

Cathedral Notre Dame, Quebec City, originally uploaded by jezza323.

These are a couple of shots from inside the Cathedral Notre Dame in Quebec City, which is the head of the Catholic Church across all of Canada. You can read some of the Cathedral’s history here on wikipedia

It is a very unassuming building from the outside, but the inside is quite spectacular. We ended up visiting here a couple of times. We happened by it ourselves whilst wandering the streets, and the following day we did a guided walking tour which also stopped in at the Cathedral. Take note of the lovely sky painted on the ceiling. It was very overcast and rainy both times we were inside so it was good to see a little blue sky somewhere.

Cathedral Notre Dame Quebec, originally uploaded by jezza323.

Both shots here were done handheld with my Pentax K200D and Sigma 10-20mm, at ISO1600 (highest my old body goes!) and are 3 exposure HDR’s taken at +/- 2.0 EV. The noise reduction in Photomatix, which I used for blending, seems to have done a great job on the noise. The noise is still quite noticeable in the full size images though. I used Tone Mapping with the Enhancer method in both cases to generate the final image.

Enjoy!

Grand Prix du Canada

 

Grand Prix du Canada Stand 21, originally uploaded by jezza323.

The Grandstand

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently spent the weekend in Montreal to attend the Grand Prix du Canada (Formula 1 Grand Prix). You must view this panorama in large size!

The View

I had seats in Grandstand #21, which luckily happened to be right next to the entrance to the track, as well as having a great view of the hairpin. This is the view from the edge of the stand, my seats were a bit off to the left of the photo, but the view was almost as good!

Shooting the Panorama

This panorama was shot using my Pentax K200D and Tamron 17-50mm. I took about 10 shots in portrait orientation at 17mm, with lots of overlap to give me the best chance of a successful panorama. It worked out very well considering the challenges of the image, and only the railing of the grandstand and some minor problems from moving people were encountered.

Harsh Lighting

It was a very bright sunny day which meant the shadows were quite harsh, so, once Autopano had stitched the image together for me, I loaded the single TIFF file into Photomatix and generated a low key HDR. This is the result, good view isn’t it?

Carn Webber!

To make the panorama extra special, that is my favourite driver Mark Webber in his Red Bull Racing car approaching on the right side of the image. Webber finished the race weekend 3rd, after being hit and spun in the 1st corner of the race, a good comeback! It was also a very spectacular race, Jenson Button won the race after a come from behind victory. During the race he had a drive through penalty, a flat tyre and was run into by his own team mate! What a performance.