Daily Travel Photo: Christ the Redeemer
Christ the Redeemer by Brendan van Son
The Set Up
Christ the Redeemer – in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – might be one of the most photographed landmarks in the world. It is right up there with the Eiffel tower and Big Ben. So when photographing I shot every single angle, with every lens in my bag. I have close ups of the face, wide panoramic from fingertip to fingertip, and low obscure angles. It is hard to try and make a classic image your own, but that’s the fun of photography isn’t it?
The Shot
Shooting at midday is a bit of photographers nightmare. The sun tends to burn out the detail on anything and everything. So to fix this problem in this shoot I did two things. I shot in RAW (which I always do anyways), that allows some wiggle room to recover burnouts; but in this case I actually burned out part of the image on purpose for effect. And I threw on a circular polarizer which would bring out the blues of the sky and darken the image a bit.
Obviously, this image has been post produced quite a bit. I basically wanted to make the image look spiritual. What I did was bumped the vibrance and threw in a gradient vignette which gives the dark to light effect you see, as well as the rounded corners. In the end, I think I achieved what I wanted.
I shot this image at 18mm with the aperture at f7.1 and a shutter speed of 1/100. Iso100.
Buying the Print
You can buy this image in various forms, print, canvas, poster, greeting cards, via imagekind. You can check out prices by clicking on the image.
What’s Next?
Tomorrow I have an article coming out that I think you’ll find interesting. Basically, I will be looking into Rio de Janeiro and our society’s desire to seek out negative news. It will be called “Rio and the Bad News Bears”