LightningPaul

This is another look of an energy producing factory, shot near Oostende, Belgium. Almost two months ago I posted a view of the stairs of the same company, which are just around the corner behind the big pipe in front. These metal structures are pretty impressive. I hope to shoot one day on a chemical site where you have countless pipes and little machines.


TECH-INFO: to get the details of the clouds and the part under the big pipe I shot 5 images, each a stop difference. After lens corrections in DxO Optics Pro, I merged them into HDR file with Photoshop. The latter is extremely handy for automatically aligning them because I took all the pictures hand held. After all, a tripod was not allowed.
The HDR is tone mapped in Photomatix Pro, a program which is becoming the standard for HDR processing. The result is enhanced in Photoshop, because the contrast is mostly too low. I applied the B/W tool (of CS3) with the settings for making the blues and cyans darker. Remarkably, the sliders of the tool had no effect on the building or pipes because they were fully gray. I didn't make it fully B/W, some blue is left in the sky but now it looks more dramatic. The walls of the factory where brightened using layers in screen blending mode.