Mid-morning on a Tuesday. The Main Concourse of NYC's Grand Central Terminal is bustling with commuters, tourists and assorted people in transit. The natural sunlight coming from the huge windows located on either end of the concourse is balanced with the warm artificial light emanating from the huge chandeliers that decorate the side walls. This is a cavernous space, 84 m long, 37m wide and 38m high, and always filled with crowds of busy people.
Photographing this beautiful station is usually on the list of everyone visiting the city, and you should expect all the usual locations to be filled with camera, smartphone and tablet wielding people. At this time of the day, the natural light is exceedingly strong and hard to balance with the interior lights, making the stone floor very bright. It took me about 45 minutes to take all the shots that make up this image, 20 of those just to get the spot I wanted on the stairs that lead up to the Apple Store. And then, over the course of 25 minutes, proceeded to get exposures for all the light levels, and also to remove most of the stationary persons that wore standing in the middle of my composition. The final image is made up of 12 photographs and took me around another 45 minutes to compose with a mixture with HDR and layer blending techniques.
-- Gear Fujifilm X-PRO1 Samyang 8mm f2.8 Fisheye -- Post Lightroom : HDR photomerge, initial toning and final crop Photoshop: Manual layer blending, sharpening, colour blending and clean up NikCollection Color Efex Pro 4: Toning and Detail extraction