While staying with family in Bath over Christmas I got in a day trip to Wells. This is the size of a small market town but with a large Cathedral in its centre making it a City. The Cathedral was built between 1175 and 1490, replacing an earlier church built on the same site in 705.. Each Cathedral is different in its attitude to Photographers and Wells is one of the friendly ones. Their Website said they welcomed Photography outside service times and the only restriction was on flash in one part of the building. No mention of Tripods so I ended up taking all my shots with a Tripod and nobody objected.

This is a view of the stairs to Wells Cathedral Chapter House. It has been done many times before and indeed is said to be the most photographed interior view of any Cathedral. The Chapter House was finished by 1306 and was the meeting place for Cathedral affairs. The stairs to it have thus been worn by many centuries of use. I tried something a little different from the usual by going for a very low POV and focusing on the steps. Many pictures of this view are done in mono but I wanted to keep the warmth through the Archway.

The picture was taken with a tripod with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10 mm. I took 3 shots for HDR processed in Photomatix using fusion Real Estate for a natural look. I copied the minus 2 image in as a new layer after reducing the exposure some more in RAW and used a layer mask to apply that only to bring down highlights. Further processing using Topaz Clarity for more detail. In Photoshop I straightened the drastically converging verticals using Transform-Skew and also Filter-Lens Correction- Custom- Vertical Perspective.