I ventured out to the downtown area of Savannah on Friday afternoon to meet up with Kyle Johnson, a photographer friend I had recently met at a Meetup. Kyle has a growing interest in HDR Photography and wanted to get together so I could share a few tips with him.

I arrived in the downtown area around 1:30pm and wasn’t due to meet Kyle for another hour or two. This gave me an opportunity to peruse around the Savannah squares at a nice, slow pace. As I moved from square to square, I stopped at several places and snapped some shots. Knowing that heavy clouds were forecast to move in soon, I kept looking up at the sky. As I looked up one time, I noticed the peaks of The Cathedral of St. John The Baptist in the distance. Knowing how gorgeous this Cathedral was on the inside, I ventured in that direction.

When I walked inside of the Cathedral, I was very impressed with how massive it was. The intricate details were incredible. There was about 20 other people inside who were either walking around or sitting and preying. To my delight, a lot of people were taking pictures. I setup my tripod towards the back and began taking some shots. Unfortunately, with there being so many visitors, all of my shots were filled with tourists. That was ok I told myself, because I was planning on masking them out when I post-processed my photos.

Shortly after leaving the Cathedral, I met up with Kyle. We walked around some of the squares and both took some pictures of various things that struck our attention. Because I knew how great churches/cathedrals look in HDR, I asked Kyle if he wanted to get some pictures of the Cathedral. He was interested, so we walked over in that direction.

When we walked inside of the Cathedral, I was surprised how few tourists were now there. As we walked around for 5-10 minutes, it became even less crowded. Unbeknownst to us, the Cathedral was closing at 5pm and it was now 4:57pm. As Kyle was taking some shots from the front of the Cathedral, a grumpy man in the back signaled to us that it was time to leave. As I walked towards the back, I asked the grumpy man if I could take one more picture. He replied “If you can take in two minutes or less, you can.” I quickly setup my tripod and took my 3 final bracketed shots, which were used for the photo appearing within this post. There were only 2 other people who appeared within the shot and I decided to leave them in it. Can you spot them?