Location : Oradour-sur-Glane, a sad and poignant place in the Limousin region of west-central France. In June 1944 during the Second World War, 642 people including women and children were massacred by German SS troops. The ruins of the village were preserved just as they were after the massacre, on the orders of the then French president, Charles de Gaulle. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site but the original has been maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.

It was middle of the day when I captured this image using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkIII camera and a Canon 24mm f/3.5 L II TS-E lens. The biggest problem was waiting for the area to be free of school children for the exposures. I used Live View focusing at 10x on the closest part of the car. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/11, ISO 100 and daylight white balance. I then captured a series of 9 exposures from an eighth of a second all the way to 1/2000th of a second. The RAW processing, creating and saving of the HDRI was all done in Photoshop CS6. The HDRI TIFF file was then opened and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro. The final adjustments were then done in Photoshop, with the Nik Color Efex Pro plug-in.