What's remarkable about this image is that when I stood there and looked at the temple, the sky was virtually black. I could see ever so faintly some color that I thought might be clouds, but I wasn't really sure I could reveal what I believed was there. My photo tour group and I photographed the temple from a different vantage at twilight, and by the time we arrived at this location the blue hour had vanished. So, I did a test. I took one picture from a tripod, of course, and I grossly overexposed the image by 3 full f/stops. This completely blew out the structure, but it revealed the color and detail in the sky that I thought I could detect with my eyes. That told me an HDR composite was the answer to capturing the image I really wanted. So, I did a 5-frame HDR sequence, and I moved the set of exposures to the right on the exposure scale. In other words, the darkest exposure wasn't that dark while the lightest exposure showed the detail in the sky. Notice there is even detail in the leaves, yet to my eyes they were totally black. When I put the composite together in Photoshop, the highlight on the gold dome was still a bit blown out, so I used the clone tool on a lowered opacity to carefully fill in that overexposure. I used a 16-35mm lens, and my settings for the middle exposure of the HDR sequence was 5 seconds, f/4.5, and 500 ISO. This is Dhammayazika Temple in Bagan, Burma.
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