Down the Tunnel

Photo of the Day

While in Chicago last August we took in two baseball games in one day. To avoid traffic in between we took the subway to get around. While waiting for our train I had this idea for a picture. The idea is basically what you see above. I liked the idea of this old subway tunnel dark and dingy with a bright ad for the new iPad. For some reason these two things really seemed to clash, but also make the picture interesting.

Technical Data

I had this thought of an HDR picture that would allow me to see down the tunnel. Of course the light was too dim for me to hand hold the HDR shot. I had to take one of the exposures, and try and simulate what I was thinking at the time. I used Matt Kloskowski’s strong version of his HDR in Lightroom presets. From there I took away some of the color to add to the dinginess of the tunnel. At first I wanted to use the noise reduction in software in Lightroom to get rid of the noise. What that did though was make everything look too clean for me. I reset that value so that I could have my grunginess back. I also used the brush inside of Lightroom to make the tunnel more visible. On the original image the tunnel was just dark. I wanted to be able to see just enough of it so that you could imagine that it goes on forever.