Quite Royal for North Carolina! I’m presenting a few High Dynamic Range (HDR) shots of the Governor’s Palace in New Bern, NC. The Palace area was originally built in 1770 and consists of three main buildings with a few smaller structures. Along with the main building above, there is a stable building and a kitchen. Each would be considered a large home today.

Since the powers that be do not allow any photography inside the buildings, I’m only showing outside shots. So, if you want to see the interesting artifacts and antiques along with an informative and entertaining tour, I encourage you visit in person.

This is what’s called the Stable Office and it’s the only original building on the estate. The main and kitchen buildings were rebuilt in the 1950s. During my visit, I found it difficult to notice the difference in age. So, the restoration/rebuilding is very good.My last image is one of the most photographed views of the Palace. If you do a web lookup for Tryon Palace, you’ll see many shots that look just like this one.  But, I’m hoping that they’re similar but not the same since I’ve tried to use my HDR process to bring more reality to the view.Processing: Each of these images started as nine exposures from -2 to +2 ev at .5 ev intervals. After merging the exposures with Nik HDR Efex Pro for tone mapping, I used Control Points to enhance the Structure in the bricks and ground areas. The skies turned out pretty good and only needed a little work in Adobe Photoshop. I finished the images by using Hue/Saturation to get the colors just right. Then I used Curves to balance the light and dark areas. And finally, High Pass Filter was applied (very lightly) to add more of a crisp look to the overall scenes without getting too brittle.

One last note: The first and third images had quite a bit of vertical curvature. So, I used  Photoshop Lens Correction and Adaptive Wide Angle to restore them to a more realistic view. I left some horizontal distortion in the last image for something a bit different. Did you notice it?

Equipment used: Nikon D700 with 28-70mm f/2.8 lens set at 50, 28 and 28mm. All images shot at f/13, ISO 400.