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 EF 24-105mm F/4 L lens set to 60mm. The camera was adjusted to the highest position on the tripod to shoot over a wall, the CamRanger made it possible to set up without being able to look through the viewfinder. 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 a quarter second all the way to 1/1000th second in one-stop increments using the CamRanger. 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, the monochrome layer added with Nik Silver Efex Pro and the frame in Nik Color Efex Pro. It was a very busy image in all colour so the monochrome conversion and a layer mask allowed me to bring back colour to just the cars.