Photowalk at the Bartlett BAPS Mandir
I met up with some friends last weekend to take some photos of the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir.
This is a magnificent hindu temple located in in Bartlett Illinois. The building covers 100,000 sq ft. Completed in 2004 took 2.5 million volunteer hours to build.
Built from limestone quarried in Turkey and marble quarried and crafted in India, to be finally assembled in Bartlett, Illinois. Notably no iron or steel is used in the structure. For more information on the construction see this.
We arrived there in awe of the place. It was unfortunately a cold and heavily overcast Sunday morning. Sadly no photography is permitted in the interior. Which I completely understand as there as worshipers there who need privacy. The exterior photographs do not do the building justice. The interior is far more elaborate and intricate.
We spent some time walking around the exterior and I managed to get some interesting pictures. The sky was very drab and therefore I took a few bracketed shots and processed them as HDR. It is interesting to see how much texture can be brought out of a drab sky with HDR.
Photographs were processed in Photoshop CS5 with Niksoftware HDREfex pro for the HDR. Some sharpening and noise reduction was also done.
Click on the photograph to see a larger view. For more see my Flickr feed.
My favorite is this one.
May 28th, 2011 at 8:05 am
Great photos Irfan, i missed this one but anywhoo… great job… those are really amazing structures… i have not dip my hands on HDR.. will do one of these days..
June 1st, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Thanks for the comment Neil. Great to hear from you. Keep in touch.