Creative Garden Photography

Extending Dynamic Range

Hunedoara Castle—This Transylvanian Gothic-Renaissance castle in Romania is one of the world’s largest castles. It wonderfully combines scale, creepiness, turrets, and a bridge across the moat. All that is missing is a dragon nestling on the turret.

As you can see in this image, the moat has been turned into a kind-of garden with a path along the remaining waterway.

In making this image, I was confronted with a dynamic range problem. There’s a vast dynamic distance between the garden areas in the moat and the bright sky with the sunburst.

I exposed for the brighter areas in the sky and rescued the too-dark foreground using ...