Lichfield Cathedral

Those of you that know Lichfield will realise that this is not a straight forward picture.  The cathedral close is not long enough to easily allow an end on view without horrendous leaning verticals, there are always people in the way and the stonework is very dark compared to the clear blue sky.

To achieve the above result I took a set of 5 bracketed exposures using an ultra wide (12mm) distortion-free lens with the camera in portrait format but truly horizontal.   I merged them to form an HDR image and then cropped out all the unwanted foreground and cloned out the various people and other distractions that I did not want.   A final tweak to the contrast and I had an acceptable result.  Worth the effort?  Probably not, but it was all great fun seeing what was possible.

Edit:  Is it just me or can anyone else see King Kong at the bottom of the right hand spire?