Sri Navaneetha Krishnar Temple – Dodda Mallur | Click to enlarge
Nikon D90, Tokina 11-177mm lens. Handheld three shot bracket, f8, 1/325 sec, ISO 125. Processed with Phtomatix merge-to-32-bit plugin, Lightroom, Nik Color efex pro.

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A Day Trip From Bangalore to Mysore

Our Yoga trip to Bangalore was mostly sightseeing for the first week.  Although every morning and evening there was a yoga practice, but the rest of the day we were off playing and photographing in and around Bangalore.  On our ride to Mysore to see the Royal Palace, our driver stopped and let us rest at the ancient temple of Sri Navaneetha Krishnar.  By some accounts this temple is about 3,000 years old while others place it closer to 1,500 years.  Too many of my lifetimes to make musch of a difference to me and it was very photogenic, as seen here.

Getting up to the gate of the temple we had to navigate what looks like a 24/7 tourist/farmers market.  This temple is a popular pilgrimage destination so no shortage of street vendors, booths for those who can afford them, and other vendors with their wares laid out on a blanket in along the wide walkway up to the VERY SCARY looking gates that lead into this ancient temple.

Inside Sri Navaneetha Krishnar Temple

Creepy, just a little bit.  Very cool too, in an Indiana Jones kind of way. If our driver wasn’t in a hurry to get to Mysore, I would have wanted to explore that one more thoroughly.

Processing With The New Photomatix Lightroom Plugin

Photomatix Pro for Mac is my favorite HDR software.  This product just does it right and all the others fail in one respect or another, even Adobe’s Merge to HDR in Photoshop doesn’t get it right.  Photomatix Pro is pretty much universally embraced by all the top HDR photographers.

When the makers of Photomatix Pro released their new plugin for Adobe Lightroom last month I was doing the happy dance.  Finally I had the tools to be able to teach beginning HDR enthusiasts to make awesome images with a minimum of software expense and not a huge learning curve to get it right.  The plugin does it all automatically.  All you do is select your bracketed shots, right-click, and send them into the plugin for merging and automatically re-importing the resulting 32-bit HDR file back into Lightroom where we can finish processing without going anywhere else.

That’s how I processed this shot of the Sri Navaneetha Krishnar Temple.  If you want to give it a try, use my promo code PerfectHDR to get a 15% discount when you buy the Photomatix merge to 32 bit plugin for Mac or for Windows.  If you think you’ll stick with HDR awhile, you may just to go whole hog and get the full Photomatix Pro bundle for Mac or Windows for $119 and my promo code gives you 15% off on that too!  The bundle includes the merge to 32 bit plugin, so it’s a really good deal to get it all if you enjoy making HDR photography as much as I do.

Related articles

• The Journey to Mysore, India: Lighting the Sacred Fire through Ashtanga Yoga.