Basilica Cistern

View On White

From My Blog

I decided to leave Demonicus--my trusty tripod--at home for my recent trip to Istanbul. I wanted to give my D700 a good high ISO workout since I know I will be going back to Istanbul many more times in the future. There was one site we visited that I had never visited before and I was very, very impressed with it. I really had to fight to get some usable shots though since it was the underground Basilica Cistern, which is very dark inside. It had a decent wooden rail to place the camera on, but even at ISO 4,000, I still had to take some long exposures and the wooden railing wasn't quite cutting it since I had to actually press down on the camera to keep it balanced.

I decided to give this the HDR treatment as well, I like the way they look coming out of this camera and the cistern had so many neat textures and and cool reflections that are really brought out with HDR.

3XP HDR @ -1/+1 EV Steps
Exposure: 0.8
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 14 mm
ISO Speed: 4000