Documenting the Power

Photo of the Day

Yesterday was a little bit of a change up for me. After a weekend of high shutter speeds and big glass I slowed it down a bit. I shot some interiors of the old Purdue power plant. The building is getting ready to be torn down so they wanted some photos of it to document it. Some of the photos I made were for the project, but some were made for fun for me. I really have not had much time to mess around with HDR lately. These interiors of the building were perfect for long exposures and HDR work. I could have really went over board here with the HDR, but I did not. I had a blast shooting the building, and I am sure that I will post a couple of more photos from the day when I have more time. Tonight it will be back to shooting sports at high speed, but it was nice to slow it down a bit for a day.

Technical Data

For this photo I knew that I had a very wide range of light. This photo was part of a three shot bracketed exposure. I shot it at -2, 0, and +2. With the tight quarters I did not want to have too much extra equipment so I did not bring my cable release. I just used the self timer function on my camera. When I came home I started by importing all of my images from the shoot into Lightroom 5. From there I sent the three bracketed images into Photomatix Pro 5. The new version of this program really has some nice features, but once it was done merging my images I sent the 32 bit file back into Lightroom to work with it there. With a large file with plenty of data I used the HDR Look preset by Matt Kloskowski to get the look that I wanted. This is not over the top, but it is a great way to deal with a wide range of light.