A Historic Hotel in Boswell, Indiana

Yesterday my daughter fell asleep on the way to go shopping so I went for a little drive to let her sleep. I ended up visiting the small towns of Oxford and Boswell on the western edge of Indiana. Both towns were full of these historic buildings that are a photographers dream. I didn’t have much time so I took some scouting photos along with some like this one that I wanted to post. This former hotel looks like it was last a printing company, but it did have many ads on the side as well. I thought that it was a cool building that I hoped to do justice with a HDR treatment to it. I will have more of the buildings of both of these towns in the near future. I may take a day to walk both towns as I think that they are gold for photography.

Creating a Subtle HDR Image

For the last year or so I have been trying to tone down my HDR images a bit. I use a technique that I learned from Matt Kloskowski that really has helped me out a lot. I send my files to Photomatix to process into a 32 bit file. When that is complete instead of using the sliders in Photomatix I send the file back to Lightroom. From there I have a nice large file to work with. I know the sliders much better in Lightroom, and I think that has translated into HDR images that look much more realistic. Sometimes your techniques change, but I think that this one will stick around for a while. It is a great way to capture all of the detail in a scene in a realistic way.