Spirals

I love photographing spiral staircases, and one of the most beautiful I've seen is the 17th century Tulip Staircase in the Queen's House in Greenwich, England. I photographed it with every wide angle lens in my camera bag, from a fisheye to a 24-105mm, giving me a variety of renditions. For this shot, I used a 24mm focal length. Because I composed this with the foreground railing so close to the camera, depth of field became an important issue. I took this image five years ago when I was still using the Canon 5D Mark II, and I hated to go above 1600 ISO due to the noise. This was before I started using Neat Image software to minimize or eliminate noise. My settings were 1/30, f/11, and 1600 ISO. Had I been shooting today with my current camera, the Canon 1Dx Mark II, I would have used f/22 and allowed the ISO to go higher. Even with f/11, though, I was able to have complete depth of field which was essential for a shot like this.I used tungsten white balance which produced the blue/cyan color.