LightningPaul

This is taken at the borders of the Bronkhorst. It's the smallest city in Holland. It's very cosy and well structured. Before you enter the city you can park your car on a specially provided parking place. From that point on you can very easily visit the place on foot. It has a couple of nice restaurants and and many little traditional shops. There is even a playground for children. On the picture above you see the land which is surrounding this tiny little city.


TECH-INFO: due to the high contrast of light (some parts where in the shadows) I took 5 JPGs, hand held, with each a stop difference. First I corrected lens flaws in DxO Optics Pro, then I aligned and merged them into a 32-bit HDR file in Photoshop. I tone mapped it a to a 16-bit TIFF file in Photomatrix. The reasons for this whole process is to get a sharper image and to balance the light in the image because of the too high contrast. The latter is normally done by your brains when you look at the scene.

In Photoshop I enhanced the contrast globally as well locally on different spots. Besides that I mixed two self taken textures using the soft light blending mode together with two rectangular vignettes. The first texture is an image of some dust on my television screen. I borrowed this idea of the Really Japan photo blog. The second texture is a shot of blue stone. It has this this nice and typical scratches.
On the first vignette I painted a bit using brush and I blended it with the TV dust texture and the original image. The second texture is placed on top.  At the end I added the second vignette which darkens the borders of the whole image.

Let me know if you love it or hate it :-)