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Last weekend I had the privilege of heading out to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China. It’s about a 90 minute drive from Beijing and you simply have to head out there if you have the opportunity. It’s much more physically demanding than you ever imagined but the hike is worth it! There are crowds and crowds of people from around the world who will join you on the Wall, but you’ll find moments where it’s just you and the Wall and you start to understand the scale and enormity of the site.  It should absolutely be on your bucket list list of travel goals and probably close to the top if it isn’t already.

On the Wall you’ll find numerous watchtowers, each with their own design and character.  I loved letting the windows of the watchtowers frame my shots for me, I felt like they framed the emotion of the scene and let me try to find something interesting outside.  So here’s this week’s Picture of the Week!

Window of the Wall

For the photographers: This picture is entirely owed to the dynamic range of the Sony a7rII, otherwise I would’ve had to set up a tripod and bracket a bunch of shots together.  Instead I was able to take a single shot handheld (f6.3, 1/250s exposure, ISO 100) and pull out the detail of the shadows just fine.  I ran it through my normal post processing workflow and finished it off with Nik Color Efex Pro 4 and some high pass sharpening in Photoshop.