White Church - behind the scene

This week, 1x (http://www.1x.com/photo/705021/all:user:160069) has published my second long exposure fine art landscape colour image, "White Church". I have nine wildlife and two fine art images published by 1x so far. It is extremely difficult to get images published by 1x and they say that only about 3% pass the curation process. As I received several enquires whether the image was real and how I got to the final result, I thought to talked a little about the behind the scene. The image was shot somewhere in Iceland at the end of May/beginning of June this year. I say somewhere because it was a heavy rainy day and we could barely see outside. I just remember that we were travelling around the Snaefellsnes peninsula.
There is nothing in the image that was not already there. The raw file is pretty gloomy and flat and all I did was to work on enhancing tones and, making it really gloomy! A strong vignette applied in Alien Skin Effex 6 set the tone for further enhancements. I worked selectively on the whites, making them brighter and on the reds increasing the saturation. A red tone was also selectively applied on the clouds' movement in the sky, as a reflection to the roof of the church. I selectively worked on the cross, to avoid it to disappear in the dark sky. A high pass filter was selectively applied to the building. I also introduced grain in the sky. The title White Church was suggested by the effort to develop a sister image to another image that I named Black Church (www.giuliozanni.com/featured/black-church-giulio-zanni.html). However, the two images showed different approaches and post-production styles, Black Church being a toned black and white long exposure stitched panorama of two horizontal images.
White Church was shot with a Sony A7r and a Sony/Zeiss 24-70/4 OSS lens on a Gitzo series 2 carbon fibre tripod.
In one of my next write up I will cover some of my long exposures techniques.

If you are interested in purchasing framed prints of White Church please see here www.giuliozanni.com/featured/white-church-giulio-zanni.html or contact me at giulio.zanni@gmail.com

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