LightningPaul

Made in Barcelona, near the casino, under a statue which looks like a gigantic fish without a head, called Peix de Gehry. I was fascinated by the structures. The grid in the background is some "gold" colored metal which makes the shape of the fish (you can't see this shape on this image). The white poles support the metallic grid. The black background forms the sky.


TECH-INFO: because of the too high contrast (it was around 12h00) I took 5 shots, hand held, with each a stop difference. After DxO processing and merging them into a HDR file (in Photoshop), I tone-mapped it (in Photomatix) and continued working on it in Photoshop. First I fiddled with the colors using the selective color tool. Using a screen blend mode layer and by masking the white poles (with the magic wand) and some parts of the structure behind I got white metallic structure much brighter. Finally I tried the B/W tool where I killed the blue tones (= making them very dark). The opacity is set on 90% so some color is left. The combination of the selective color tool and B/W tool give you a great set of parameter to do an excellent form of B/W conversion. Finally some vignetting is added.