Chantilly is a few kilometers north of Paris, it’s got a large forest and plenty of nature. In addition to a few luxury hotels and resorts. Last weekend I took my wife and son to the Hotel Mont Royal, a castle in the middle of the forest that has been turned into an amazing hotel. We got lucky on the weather (like most Europeans) and had an amazing time all together. My son went for his first swim in a pool and we celebrated his 6th month.

As I haven’t been shooting for a while I thought it’s time to get out there again and use this relaxing weekend to get out and shoot. I thought the hotel/castle would be a great subject to shoot but it turned out not. I just couldn’t get the lights, sunset and cars to align so I skipped that.

This morning as we woke up my wife pointed out the window to show me the mist between the trees which looked spectacular. So I grabbed the camera and tripod and went to the roof terrace of the chateau to find a good angle. As the hotel is built on a small hill the view over the forest is spectacular, it’s quite different to look at a forest from the top and not from the bottom.

So I managed to capture this great sunrise over the forest of Chantilly. The photo here is not HDR, I shot it in HDR but I prefer this version as it’s more natural on the sun. But the HDR version is slightly warmer. I posted the HDR one here: Sunrise in Chantilly HDR and I’ll let you judge for yourself.

The photo isn’t exactly straight out of the box, I changed the white balance to give it the blueish look which I like. Otherwise it looks as if I had put a yellow filter on the whole thing and I’m not a big fan of that. In my mind a sunrise in the forest is chilly and so I feel like a blue tint is right. And you’re welcome to disagree with me on that as this is totally subjective.

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02 Oct This entry was published on October 2, 2011 at 6:13 pm. It’s filed under Canon 5D Mark II, Forest, HDR, Landscape, non-HDR, Paris, Sunset and tagged blue, chantilly, HDR, mist, non-HDR, photography, sunrise, trees. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.