Last week I went to visit the famous Chateau Vaux le Vicomte which is about 50km from Paris. The castle has a famous history since it is said that due to the beauty of this castle and the gardens the then king of France imprisoned Nicolas Fouquet (the owner) since he was jealous that someone else could have a better castle than his. That then motivated him to build Versailles which was to be much bigger and better. The iron mask tale was included in this (it was said that the man in the iron mask was Fouquet).

While that makes for a romantic history, it isn’t quite what happened at least current historians have tracked it down to something much more “banal” which is that Fouquet was a large financier of the Kings war efforts and probably he must have put some pressure to get his money back. That with a little power push by someone who was ripping the king off got him locked up. Unfortunately that sound more true and unfortunately that sounds very similar to current war events… say no more.

Well enough about history and politics, I took the photo handheld at 100 iso, the sky was quite nice but was getting cloudy and I was too early for the great sunset sky. Since I was there with my very pregnant wife and our family I couldn’t really wait a few hours for the sunset so I took it as it.

I HDR’d the image with photomatix and then took it in Topaz to pull out some of the colors of the sky which weren’t really coming out as they should.

The funny thing with the debate on “to HDR or not to HDR” is that I quite like working in post-production on the images. It gives me the sensation of creating the image rather than just “capturing”. Well that’s a personal viewpoint.

26 Mar This entry was published on March 26, 2011 at 1:08 pm. It’s filed under Buildings, Canon 5D Mark II, HDR, Landscape, Monument, Paris, winter and tagged Building, Buildings, chateau, HDR, Parc, Paris, photography, Photomatix, photos, sky, trees, vaux le vicomte, winter. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.