Photo of the Day
Last night it was getting very late and I didn’t have a picture. We were driving through Lafayette after a fun night when I spotted this neon. I have seen it before, but was always thinking that the sign with the building would not look good. Last night I decided to just shoot the neon. I guess that I have been seeing too many of Thomas Hawk’s posts on Google+ lately. I like how it looks, but something is just missing for me.
Technical Data
This is a three shot HDR that was processed in Photomatix. I then take the 32 bit file back into Lightroom to finish the processing. The sliders there are so much more powerful, and I think that I get more realistic results that way. I think that I finally found a method of HDR that is for me after almost a year of trying. Early on I really liked the over the top look. I think that it was so new I wanted to max it out. That left me with unrealistic images with halos that I cringe at now. They will stay up though as a look back to how I have grown. I am sure that someday I will look at this image much the same way. Hopefully I have grown enough that I think back on this one as a time when I didn’t know anything.
Edit: As I was getting ready to hit the publish button to post this I realized that I have a couple of more tools to look at this picture with. I opened Lightroom back up, and moved over to the preset section. I ended up really liking the electric storm preset that I purchased from Trey Ratcliff. I looked at the settings to see what made it better than what I did on my own, and I realized that not much was done. It really was just a minimal set of controls. In the end I realized that I go in and start cranking on levers when I don’t always have to.
Dave Wegiel Photography 