Immediately prior to embarking on our first ever cruise we spent three days in the Chinese capital city of Beijing – a fabulous place; we’d head back in a heart beat – and the very last tourist spot we visited before making our way to the cruise port was the Temple of Heaven. This was such a vibrant place and I’d have loved to have spent many more hours than we had not just exploring the complex but also simply watching the local people engaging in all sorts of social activities. Pictured below is a game of dominoes in progress between some men and I love the seriousness, the concentration, and even the slight hint of menace and tension in the players’ faces and body language.
This has been reprocessed using my classic black and white treatment, which is to say that the original RAW file was converted to black and white then pseudo-processed at five different exposure points, making sure to keep blown highlights and shadow depths to a minimum, to generate five images of different brightness and different levels of detail in each of them. Photomatix Pro was used to generate an HDR composite, tone-mapped image, and then it was just a case of playing with the settings until I got something I liked. There’s noise in the dark areas of the image which is something I’m fine with – certainly more so when the photo is monochromatic rather than colour – even if the regularity of it does hint at the failings of the camera sensor to work with the low light as opposed to bringing out a textural quality I don’t want to lose by smoothing over.