This is the Château de Chinon captured from across the River Vienne in the 'Blue Hour'. The château has a long history but among other things, it is famous because Joan of Arc lived here - in the tower on the extreme right. It is here that she proved she was 'Sent by God' by picking out the Dauphin who had disguised himself as a servant.
The scene is impressive. Too wide a tonal range for SOOC unfortunately. You might have tried Active D Lighting on high if you don't want to edit out of the camera?
@frankhymus Thanks Frank - your suggestion is sound but I didn't want to do that as I'm intending to use the same settings all month. In fact, the D5100 has coped rather well - the two dark bands with no shadow detail are unlit trees and shrubbery and I couldn't see any detail with my naked eye either.
@vignouse Well, OK. I would have done something like this to it though. https://www.dropbox.com/s/dqh60vwj3rtzck4/Jean%20d%27Arc.jpg?dl=0. The image is even too much, at least in jpeg, for the tone sliders of ACR to get properly "interesting" so after correcting the highlights and the color balance, took it into Photoshop, changed the mode to Lab color and applied a significant "inverted" contrast curves correction on the L channel. Lab is necessary here since RGB messes up the colors with the significant adjustments I resorted to. I thought perhaps you might be interested to "see" more than you said your poor eyes could.
@vignouse The D5100 performed well, BTW, especially allowing my operation on the small jpeg even. The standard Nikon blues and greens though are way too much for me, even on the 7100 and the 6/8x0's.
@frankhymus Thanks Frank, you've done a great job and I guess I would have done something similar if I had been doing post-processing this month. I know you don't really 'get' my motivation for wanting to do this challenge, but this month, for me, learning takes precedence over the actual image produced.
@frankhymus Forgot to say that I adjusted the colour balance in camera until the colours in the captured image (transmitted to my iPad via an EyeFi card) matched what my eyes were seeing.
@graemestevens Thanks Graeme; the château is lit by tungsten floodlights whereas the street lighting is sodium vapour. The colours as you see them in this image, match what I was seeing when I took this shot.
@vignouse impressive then to get this shot - personally I always get a bit of a "kick" when I produce something that I think is good enough to post SOOC. As my lovely wife has said, being able to produce a good strong image SOOC suggests photographic skill, the ability to see the shot and capture the shot and all without resorting to too much editing (said the man that edits most of his to some degree!).
really interesting this - I have found the discipline of SOOC has really been a learning curve when I've done it in the past, it really makes you concentrate on composition and lighting, but I would have struggled not to post process this one.
@princessm Hi Decima - this château is one of my favourite things to photograph and one of the reasons for coming to Chinon this time was that I wanted a 'blue hour' photo of the château for my challenge. From where you took this, we're staying on the campsite just to your left, with a permanent view of the château.
With no disrespect to the experimenting that Frank @frankhymus did, I think I like this better. It definitely has more of the blue hour and dark mystery of this wonderful lit up chateau. True his processed version is sharper in one sense -- reveals more detail, but to my eye loses some of the warmth that particularly appeals to me. FAV Carry on with the month-long experiment.
Ian