LightningPaul

A little part of the White Nuns Street (in Dutch: Wittenonnenstraat) in Ostend, the biggest city at the Belgian coast. I really like the mood of this image. Only a little part of the facade is lit by the strong street lamp, the rest is too dark to see. I wanted to try something else. On the internet you often find images where most of them are filled with shadows making it more mysterious. They sometimes say: it's not what you light but what you don't light in an image.
Mostly my images are pretty bright, well and strongly lit and full of details. Though if you look good at this image, you'll see I enhanced some parts too.

Sorry for updating my blog less frequently but my work and private life takes so much time. Even my camera thinks it's in winter hibernation :-)


TECH-INFO: first I enhanced the contrasts and details, using the color selective tool (the whites and neutral colors are brighter) and any masked adjustment layer in overlay blending mode (I painted white on a black mask over the street label and the edges of facade). Then I made a merged copy of all the layers, applied Gaussian blur (around 20 pix radius) and blended this layer in normal mode with an opacity around 60%. This yields in a soft focus effect. Of course I decreased the effect on the label and edges of the facade by painting black or dark gray on the mask of that layer.
Finally I added a self shot dust layer (of my television screen) and blended it using the screen mode. This extra layer gives the effect of me sitting behind some dusty window while making the image. Below the facade you see some blue green colored spot, this is lens flare (or ghosting) caused by the strong light of the lamp. Let me know if this experiment worked out well. Of course I could have used HDR techniques to fully show the whole facade with all the details but I'm sure this image is more interesting.