LightningPaul

It has been a while since I joined an online challange. This image is for the theme Clocks on Shutterday. The last couple of days I have been seeking for some nice clocks. Two days ago I was in a printing office to buy tracing paper. I read on strobist.com about how to make a 10 dollar macro photo studio, so I want to try out myself. At that office I noticed this pretty big and great looking clock, standing one meter above the ground. Unfortunately I didn't had my camera with me but I came back yesterday morning, together with my tripod, bubble level and cable release. Luckily I even caught the moving seconds of the clock.


TECH-INFO: I took multiple RAW files. There was not so much time, so I only concentrated on composition and getting a good middle exposure. Three shots with each a stop difference was enough apparently. I wanted to do two things: try processing without using DxO Optics Pro and put some movement in a HDR tone mapped image. The latter is something you hardly ever see except for very long exposure with moving water.

Initially I used Photomatrix Pro for merging into HDR but unfortuantely the result was too noisy and there was still plenty of chromatic aberration, even when using the reduce options. Also the colors were a bit weird. I tried it again in Photoshop and the result was much better. One day I should try HDR PhotoStudio which promises to do a superb job, especially in handling colors.

The movements in the result was partly due to Photoshop merging process and also due to some (lucky) timing during photograping. The first exposure contained the first second hand, the second exposure a moving second hand (this one got filtered out during merging) and the last exposure the second second hand.

After merging into a HDR file, I tone mapped it in Photomatrix Pro and further enhanced it in Photoshop. Mainly contrasts in several spots, a square crop and some vignetting.

What follows is for very interested or more advanced Photoshop users (though I wouldn't call myself advanced at all). The twelve stripes and hands were darkened. The easiest way was to use an masked adjustment layer of the curves tool layer in multiply blending mode. You make the mask black and paint white (with your mouse or tablet pen) on the stripes. You make your brush a bit ticker to make it easier and to fully cover each stripe. To avoid getting the white background darker you use the advanced blending options. There you set in the section Blend If Gray the underlying layer from 0 to for instance 160, so it only affects the darker parts of the image. I even split the white pointer, using the ALT key, into 154 and 167 for a gradual change. These options are very handy to do more advanced editing in a very comfortable way.
Of course you can achieve the exact same effect by just dodging or burning on exactly the right places. It's just much slower and more cumbersome.