LightningPaul

A very old parking meter. It even dates from the time before we started paying in euros. Shot in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in France, though we had very similar ones in Belgium a long time ago. I miss them a bit. They were always standing next to the parking place. And it happened occasionally that someone else put a coin in your meter.


TECH-INFO: one RAW file of which I developed 3 exposures in DxO Optics Pro to merge them into a HDR file with Photomatrix Pro. After tone mapping I enhanced contrasts using masked adjustment layers. For the layers I mostly use the screen (to brighten), multiply (to darken) and soft light (to enhance contrast) blending modes of the curves tool. Mostly I don't even touch the parameters of the curves tool. I just paint on the layers on places where I want to have the enhancement. The painting is done with a Wacom tablet. Thanks to the pressure sensitivity I can easily control how strong the enhancement is.

I used HDR effects here only to amplify all the details of the parking meter, not because of the high dynamic range of light since it was cloudy weather. The post processing in Photoshop is to make the details even stronger.