I have an upcoming photo tour to Burma at the end of November, and I always love returning to this amazing country. The people are among the sweetest on the planet, and the photography, especially people photography, is fantastic. This picture from Bagan is interesting in that I took a chance and did a 3-frame HDR sequence in which I included the two young monks. That's risky because people can't stay perfectly still. Through my local guide, I asked the boys to be as still as possible, and it worked. I used a tripod and processed the bracketed exposures in Photoshop. This is completely natural light entering the temple, but I recognized how extreme the contrast was -- hence the need for HDR. I shot this in 2014 with a Canon 5D Mark II, and to minimize noise I used 200 ISO (today I'd use 2000 ISO). That forced the slowest shutter in the sequence to be .8 seconds. I took several HDR sequences as insurance. My lens was a 24-105mm zoom, and the aperture was f/8. Under the arch behind the Buddha, on the right side along the wall, there was a storage cage that I cloned out. That was the biggest challenge because there was so little clean wall area from which to clone over the metal mesh.
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