This is the spectacular spiral staircase in the Vatican Museum. I took this in 2006, and it always bothered me that the bright sky seen through the glass dome was solid white with no detail at all. Because I had to expose for the relatively dark interior, the sky became completely blown out. The problem in replacing the sky was retaining all of the fine structural detail in the dome. I finally decided to make an attempt at fixing the problem, so I selected the entire dome area -- the sky plus the structure -- and added contrast so the struts were darker than they appeared to be in the original. Then I pasted a cloud picture into that selection and lowered the opacity (using the small slider in the layers palette) until the structure of the dome showed through and I still had good detail in the gray clouds. After fearing I couldn't really do this picture justice for all these years, it turned out to be much easier than I thought. I used a 16-35mm wide angle for this image set on 16mm, and the settings were 1/50th, f/3.5, 400 ISO. I shot this with the Canon 5D Mark II, which was high technology at the time, and I tried to keep the ISO setting as low as possible due to the noise. I hand held the shot.
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