LightningPaul

I love typical urban shots, especially of the underground. This one is made in the subway station Magenta in Paris. Besides the riding metro, which is pretty cool, the ceiling looks awesome.

As always, I'm very happy with all the comments and visits from all of you. I really tried to reply all of them but since I'm so short of time, from now on I'll only answers questions or certain specific comments you post. I hope you forgive me. Though I will visit your photo blog whenever you leave a comment. I really love to see your images too.


TECH-INFO: one RAW file, hand held. I developed three exposures in DxO Optics Pro. Initially I tried Photomatrix for merging and tone mapping but I didn't fully like the result. There was too much noise in the train and the lighting was looking slightly too surreal. Luckily I found a nice piece of donationware: Picturenaut 3.0. The HDR program can merge exposures into HDR files and tone map them using four different methods. I didn't play so much with it yet but so far I can get pretty natural looking results, though it's not easy to tweak and understand the parameters. But on the other hand, I had the same problem in Photomatrix Pro when using it for the first weeks.
After tone mapping I loaded the result in Photoshop for more processing. The contrast is boosted and I used the channel mixer and the B/W tool for conversation into black and white. By applying masks I used the two different B/W conversions on separate parts of the image. The goal was to minimize noise. Finally I used Noise Ninja to get rid of the bit of noise which I couldn't avoid (that was due to the many contrast enhancements). At the end I used Real Grain to add lots of noise all over again :-D

You could compare this with the process of making mineral water: they take water, remove all salts and other elements, then they add the proper combination of minerals to obtain the right taste.

I was having lots of doubts to post this image or not. I really like the view of the ceiling, the passing metro and cool lamps but on the other hands it's maybe not the best image I could post. Also I'm trying to experiment with stronger contrasts, B/W, grain and other kind of looks. Feel free to give any kind of critics.