LightningPaul

Seen in the port in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in France. It looks a bit abandoned but still fantastic enough for capturing all those tiny details. I have the impression it's still in use though they might have fired the cleaning team.

A few hundred meters away I took this shot of bullet holes in a warehouse.


TECH-INFO: I had my tripod, cable release and bubble level with me, so it was easy to get everything straight and sharp. I took 5 JPGs and merged them into a HDR file. Then the real fun started:  tone-mapping in Photomatix. The result had a pretty high wow effect but was also rather surreal. As an experiment I tried tone-mapping in Photoshop. I choose for local adaptation (which is basically the same main method used by the detail enhancer in Photomatix, though 100 times less sophisticated) where I have set the radius and threshold on very high values. The more difficult part was tweaking the curves. The end result was a nice and very natural looking. Because I couldn't choose which one to use, I decided to blend both results (of Photomatix and Photoshop) together, so of each 50%.
Afterwards more processing is done in Photoshop using a few of masked adjustment layers. The latter step is as important as tone-mapping. When doing well you can create very personal and creative images (and it actually done since a long time in darkroom). If this interests you then may I advice to buy a good book about layers and masks, and make all exercises. The beginning is not so easy but once you understand how it works then your imagination is the only limit left.