No-fish-eye-shot

Works perfectly here. As you say the lack of distortion is impressive. Your processing is a work of art as usual. Love to know how you get that effect.

This is super Axel, great perspective, the marble is lovely and you have captured the amazing space, Cheers Trixie

Amazing - columns show very little convergence compared to what we'd general expect in an uncorrected image of this focal length. Looks like Sigma have cracked that problem pretty well.

Looks like it may have to go on my 'wanted' list


Steve

That's a seriously impressive shot Axel. The image quality is outstanding.
David

Hi Steve - I also think that they have done a good job (and in addition - already with aperture 8 you get really sharp pictures also at the borders and in the corners).
Some people comlain about the missing opportunity to mount filters but I don't miss them - only thing that worries me a lot is the very convex front lense - I wonder, if I manage to use this lense for years without one day bumping the lens against something

Hi Mark
the technique to get such shots requires several steps. It all starts with a series of pictures for the HDR compilation later on. I now even use a remote control to release the camera as a manual control already leads to slight different view angles which has a very negative impact to the sharpness of the resulting HDR. For the HDR I use Phtomatix and I always use a series of 5 pictures (-3, -1,5, 0, +1,5, +3)
After Photomatix I do a set of processing steps in Photoshop. Dynamics and contrast are in most cases already OK - so I work on sharpnes (using smart sharpen and then a layer overlay with the Filter High Pass). I also use smart sharpen after resizing the pic to 1000 pixel (as this shrinking always creates some blur appearance). Noice reduction can also be important with these HDRs as every noise in the original photos is emphasized in the HDR (also the reason, why use ISO 200 even with my night HDRs - not a big problem, as you have to shot the HDR pics anyway with a tripod). I more and more use Lightroom for the nice reduction - I find this far better then everything I saw in Photoshop. Finally (but not in this shot) I work with crops - they so often make the same picture so much more interesting - but as I said - not here, asI wanted to show as much of the room as possible.
The remaining settings like midtone and shadow manipulation, brightness, exposure time, clearness etc. differ from pic to pic - some require nothing and some a lot (also depending, in which direction I want to push the final result)
Coming back to the current picture:
No Crop
No Lens Correction
Increased Sharpness (with multiple steps)
Increased vibrance and saturation
Nearly no changes to midtone, shadows, brightness etc.

Hope this helped a bit
Axel

Amazing feeling of space, and beautiful lighting and architecture.

Amazing shot, wonderful lights, colours and details. Looking the result, your Sigma lens seems to really good one.

Thanks for that Axel - much appreciated. Very much learning my way with software but I rather like Lightroom and have bought Photomatix Light as well.

Fully aggree - Lightroom also becomes more and more my favorit bitmap processor and is replacing CS4 more and more - I already thought, that you use Lightroom for your fantasy style pictures, which I always find very impressive. At least I would use Lightroom, when I would try to copy your kind of unusal combination of soft shades and strong contrasts and colors and great sharpness ofyour pictures - the way you process them, makes them really unique - great style

The best IMHO

Great capture Axel.
I agree with Giulio, for me it's the best of this set.

Lovely Atmosphere with this shot