I was walking back from Edinburgh train station when I noticed the warm evening light on the right side of the Scott Monument and thought that with the new super wide angle 10mm lens it could make for an interesting photograph. So I sat down on the grass to change lenses and noticed this circular flower bed. Playing around with the composition I came up with the above image.
The Scott Monument is a Victorian Gothic monument to Scottish author Sir Walter Scott. It is very difficult to get a good photograph of the detail in this monument because it is built from Binnie shale. The oil from this type of shale helped to glue the notoriously filthy atmosphere of Victorian Edinburgh to the tower, leaving it an unintended sooty-black colour. As a result my original photograph looked very much overexposed for the sky, but underexposed for the dark detail in the stone work. This is due to the wide dynamic range of light that our eyes can see (only a small amount can be picked up by our eyes). To get the above effect I used HDR (high dynamic range) techniques to bring back the amount of detail I saw when stood photographing this subject.