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 Photograph
Taking pictures 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 took this image at 18mm with the aperture at f/7.1 and a shutter speed of 1/100. Iso100.