Vatican Museum - the Spiral Staircase

Photography: Kenneth Folman

Editing: Kenneth Folman

Type: Personal Project, Photography, Image Editing

Earlier this year I saw a very beautiful image of the spiral staircase in the Vatican Museum, and I just knew I had to go there and see it for myself and photograph it.

The Spiral Staircase was designed by the Italian architect and engineer Guiseppe Momo in 1932, and it is shaped like a double helix with two intertwined spiral staicases, one leading up and one leading down.

On the technical side, the image actually consists of three different HDR images, which in turn each are made up of 3 bracketed shots. The four HDR images are then blended together manually to mask out all the people.

Normally I am not that big a fan of HDR images, but I will admit that some HDR images can look really beautiful and well made. However I do often find that HDR looks more like an effect that vas applied to the image rather than some that was done to enhance the image and make it more like the scene that the eye saw. 

But that is of course just my opinion of HDR at the moment, and since I haven't really done any HDR images myself before, I should probably not judge it too hardly yet.

The later versions of Adobe Photoshop allows you to combine 3 bracketed shots into a 32-bit HDR file, thereby giving you much more details in the highlights and shadow areas than you would in a normal image, so I wanted to try it out since I didn't need any other HDR software.

To be honest, my initial idea of using HDR in this image was just to enhance the details in the shadow areas, but I soon found out that when you take 3 bracketed shots, the people in the shots naturally move from shot to shot. That is to be expected, and that movement causes "ghosting" in the combined image, and even though Photoshop has the option to remove this "ghosting", it does not do a very good job of it, in my opinion.

I have not tried other HDR software, so I can't comment on whether there is something out there that is better than Photoshop at removing "ghosting", but I find that Photoshop introduces weird, neon-green colors and sometimes black, instead of just removing the "ghosting", or creating a smooth "ghosting".

Luckily I had taken many sets of bracketed shots from the same position, so I ended up processing three different sets of bracketed shots into HDR images, and then I manually blended them together to mask out the people in them.

A hidden benefit of combining multiple bracketed shots into an HDR file seems to be that the resulting HDR file has less image noise than any of the original bracketed shots. That is definitely something I want to explore further in the future.