I discovered this fountain several years ago in an empty foyer to the entrance of a restaurant in the Morocco pavilion in Epcot’s World Showcase. The the colors, design, and symmetry of both the fountain and the foyer were quite stunning.
When photographing a symmetrical subject, it is imperative the camera be positioned in the center of the area to emphasize its symmetry. If the camera positon is off-center even just a little bit, the picture will not look right.
Hand-holding the camera, I positioned myself in the middle of the doorway leading to the foyer. The foyer was quite dark, much darker than it appears in this image. Since my camera, a Canon 5D Mk II, did not handle digital noise very well at higher ISOs, I had to keep the ISO relatively slow at 400 which meant using a shutter speed of only 1/10 of a second. These settings were not ideal, but they were my best option. Today, with my Canon 5D Mk IV, I could have easily increased the ISO to 1600 or 3200, raised the shutter speed, and then used noise reduction software to reduce any added noise from the higher ISO.
Processing the image, I increased the picture’s overall exposure by nearly 1-1/2 stops and added some contrast. This caused the light hanging from the ceiling to blow out, so I reduced the highlights to correct this. I also raised the shadows slightly, but I had to be careful that I didn’t go to far and introduce additional noise. I then adjusted the clarity and vibrance and added a little bit of saturation.
Despite my best efforts, hand-holding the camera using a slow shutter speed created a small amount of blurring because of camera shake. In the days of film, the image would have been thrown in the trash because there was no way to save it. In the digital era, there are some amazing tools available in Photoshop that can be used to remedy a lot of images. One of these tools is Photoshop’s shake reduction filter (Filters > Sharpen > Shake Reduction). I applied the filter and, after tweaking the settings several times, was able to eliminate the blurring that would have otherwise sent this image to the recycle bin.
My settings were 28mm, 1/10 sec, f/5.6, 400 ISO