The Roman Pool at Hearst Castle

By Edithlevy

Hearst Castle was designed by architect Julie Morgan between 1919 and 1947 for William Randolph Hearst. The castle is located on the central California coast in San Simeon and is a national and state historical landmark. William Randolph Hearst died in 1951 and in 1957 the Hearst Corporation donated the estate to the State of California. Hearst Castle boasts 56 rooms, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, an indoor and outdoor pool and sits on 126 acres.

The Roman Pool, the indoor pool, was built between 1927 and 1934. The pool is decorated with square mosaic glass tiles in blue, orange and clear and is adorned by statues of Roman gods and goddesses.

This was difficult to shoot as it was very dark in the pool and I didn’t have a tripod with me. I set my camera’s ISO to 3200 and bracketed all my exposures but some were just not as successful as I had hoped. Even with the high ISO the exposures were long and some of my images were a bit shaky so the images didn’t line up properly in Photomatix. The fist image was a single exposure but I was able to bring out the detail using Lucis.  The 2nd and 3rd images were indeed bracketed (I was able to steady myself by the railing) and processed with Photomatix.

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