LightningPaul

It's been again several weeks since I posted an image of my abandoned series. Shame on me. Especially I have still a bunch of great pictures, of those empty factories, waiting to be processed. All those images are shot in Zyrardow, Poland. It was once the greatest production center of linen on the world. Now you can only see lots of empty red brick buildings scattered over the city. Pretty amazing to see.

In front of those empty factories you see a newly placed fence with a label of a security company. These red brick buildings are all guarded. The big tower is now covered with antennas, probably for television, radio and mobile communications. Behind the red building at the left you see the remainings of a power plant. I you walk 20 meters to the left and use telephoto lens you can make a nice close-up which I posted one here.


TECH-INFO: due to the back light of the sun the contrast was very high. Nine shots of a stop difference were needed. I used DxO Optics pro to do lens corrections of all shots. The program straightens the lines, removes vignetting and reduces lens softness. Then I merged them into HDR file and tone mapped it with Photomatrix Pro.Of course I always save a copy of the original HDR file, because one day we'll be able to watch them on our HDR television screens. I can't wait for this to happen.
Afterwards, in Photoshop, I enhanced and tweaked the colors and contrast of several spots, all using masked adjustment layers. It's a really fun and artistic process (just like tone mapping is). Mainly I made the sky a bit bluer, the snow whiter, the tower is brighter (especially the antennas), the power plant got more contrast, the windows are more shiny, the dark parts are more black and the labels are clearer.