Durham Cathedral

Located high above River Wear, the Durham Cathedral in Durham, UK is one of the most prominent landmarks of Durham and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The first two Harry Potter movies were also filmed at the cathedral.

Jed and I eventually got to a corner of the cloister and decided to take a picture of it at the intersection, with the 2 corridors heading off to the left and right of frame. Because of the wide dynamic range (it’s dim inside but much brighter outside despite the cloudy day) we decided to take a bracket of 9 shots. However, halfway through the 7th, a few visitors wanted to pass, so I asked them to wait a moment for the exposure to finish before letting them pass. But this distracted me and I forgot that there are 2 more exposures to be made.

So in Lightroom, I created 3 additional “overexposed” shots (2 to complete the 9-shot bracket and 1 more) from the last exposure, loaded them into Photomatix and let it work its magic. After some tweaks in Photomatix, I exported the file to Photoshop, removed a “No smoking” sign on one of the pillars, a spot of lens flare and corrected the tilted horizon which I did not notice earlier. Here’s the result.

Durham Cathedral Cloisters
Durham Cathedral Cloister

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