LightningPaul

A closer look of one of the rooms from the many abandoned factories in Zyrardow, Poland. Most of those building are made of red bricks. They are waiting for a new destiny.

I really love to shoot such subjects. There is so much texture, structure, detail and even history. I made an image of the same building, just 20m to the right. Click here to watch it.


UPDATE: sorry for not updating my photo blog for several days but the Shutterchance server needed to recover from a severe double hard disk failure.


TECH-INFO: using a tripod, cable release, bubble level and my favorite ultra wide angle lens, I shot 9 JPGs with each a stop difference. First I corrected lens distortions in DxO Optics Pro for all pictures. Then I loaded them in Photomatrix Pro to merge them into a 32-bit HDR image and tone mapped it to a 16-bit TIFF file. This was needed because the difference between the lighting of the room and the wall outside was too big.

So now I had an image with perfectly balanced lighting which was looking great but I wanted to make it much more dramatic.
Therefore I loaded it in Photoshop where I amplified the reds, whites and blacks using the selective color tool. I created two masked adjustment layers for the curves tool: one for the room inside together with the metal bars and and one for the bricks outside. So I enhanced the contrasts separately. Also the image got cropped.
To focus more on the room I darkened the left and right sides of the wall using HSL adjustments layers and by using the gradient tool on their masks. Finally I decreased the saturation a lot and pushed the vibrancy to the max.


While taking pictures, many passing people were very surprised. It looks like an ordinary or even an ugly place where there is nothing to see. It takes an eye and some good processing techniques to obtain the result above. To show the difference I posted the middle exposed JPG shot, without any corrections, here on unprocessedLP.