A view of the Colosseum almost by evening. The shadows were gathering fast; the crowd of tourists was as noisy as ever and I was trying to take a meaningful capture of the amphitheater- something different from the usual, something telling at least a part of the story of the place; something which was not too similar to a messy, unwilled group shot. The paragraph of the story of the Colosseum I have chosen is interesting - the shot... well, I hope it is worth the effort. The fact leaves me gaping every time I think about it: for centuries the inhabitants of Rome (and the Popes as well) has been using the Colosseum as a travertine quarry at their fingertips. They took away stone upon stone from the amphitheater, to reuse them in the construction of other buildings. In our modern times we stress a lot the issue of recycling, but our sense of history makes us preserving historical heritage, while recycling our contemporary waste. However, so much of what we build and produce - even our architecture - will not be so long-lasting to be part of the history of our posterity :-(. You can find some interesting information about this story of dismantling the past here. I have blended three HDR images derived from a 3-bracketing, -1.67 ev/0/+1.67 ev, generated and tonemapped with Luminance HDR 2.4.0 (Mantiuk06, Fattal, and Reinhard05 operators). Luminance HDR 2.4.0 tonemapping parameters: Operator: Mantiuk06 Contrast Mapping factor: 0.24 Saturation Factor: 0.57 Detail Factor: 2.2 ------ PreGamma: 0.67 Operator: Fattal alpha: 1.73 beta: 0.86 Saturation: 0.42 Noiseredux: 0 fftsolver: 1 --- PreGamma: 0.79 Operator: Reinhard05 Brightness: 2.0 Chromatic adaptation: 0.91 Light adaptation: 0.28 --- PreGamma: 0.91