The wonderful thing about puddles everywhere is it presents you with the opportunity to shoot locations you’ve done previously in new and unique ways. This is an angle I likely would have never shot in a vertical of the Mexico Pavilion if not for the wonderful puddle that drew me to this spot to shoot for the reflection. Without the puddle you’d just have a lot of boring floor in the majority of the picture which isn’t very interesting. Now if only I had someone climbing the pyramid it would really finish off the image! And to think I only missed the opportunity by a few days.
I shot this with the Nikon 14-24 2.8 (I’m a broken record, I know) and as I’ve mentioned previously I was dealing with drizzle constantly through the night. It was less of an issue with this shot however as the camera was pointed more towards the ground to capture the reflection. I find the distortion of the Nikon 14-24 really interesting when shooting like this as it seems to create almost an invisible swooping leading line from the bottom to the top of the image. Maybe I’m just imagining things but I swear it does to me.
This was a very straight forward edit with a single exposure for my base layer and 2 under exposures that I masked in using luminosity masks to control the highlights. You may wonder why not just use the one correct exposure to blend the highlights and the reason I like to use more than 1 is I can get a more realistic transition from the highlights to the midtones. Blending the huge jump from the shot exposed for the shadows to the shot exposed for highlights alone just creates too sharp of a transition. Using a go between exposure really helps create a beautiful transition from the highlights to the midtones. Enjoy.
