Saturday, June 02, 2007

HDR and Dusk are kinda magic....

Since I did my first series of HDR images at Dusk I've been more than a little intrigued by how it can go either very impressionistic and surreal to very literal. Tonight I broke down and went down to an old Gas Station dating back to Monrovia's Route 66 Days. The station has been there since Monrovia had an airfield in the 1920's. It is a bit of history that remains and I figured this might be a good time to document it and experiment with the HDR.

In a bit of a flight of fancy I shot this wanting to blend in the real and surreal. For you techy kinds I shot it RAW, Average metering with an f8 Average value and ISO 400. The trusty 38-200 lense was used at a focal length of 50mm with shutter speeds of 3.2, 8 and 13 seconds. I used Photomatix Tonemapping for the HDR generation. I then finished it up with CS2 and the Virtual Photographer plug-in after it was converted down to 8bit jpeg. Then....I took that monster file and print down to 72 bit in a final size to fit better here which means a lot of subtle detail is lost...but blah blah blah...you get the idea.

Enjoy "Shamrock Gas" with the promise of more from tonights shoot to follow.

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