Picture of the Week

Well, here it is, the time has come for my first picture of the week! I mentioned that I had some themes picked out for this project, but I managed to get stuck without the ability to shoot any of the themes I originally came up with.  What I came up with instead is some urban photography, since I found myself in Cambridge on the day I was shooting. I tried to find an architectural element that could tell a story.

What I ended up finding, after about an hour of wandering through the neighborhood, was a gorgeous set of brick walls at fun angles, with interesting shadows, and this fantastic fire escape staircase. I came up with this image as my final product. This is the product of several different balances of the same shot,  out from Digital Photo Professional, canon's raw editor, and into Photoshop (CS2), where each layer was masked using (blurred) brightness information from the shot, then tweaked and balanced until it became what you see below.

I have taken a lot of time, working on shots that i like, and trying to punch them up into something more with various HDR processes.  I have tried bracketed shooting for more color data, but with moving shots, or hand held shooting that is impractical or impossible to look just right. The technique I have enjoyed the most involves bracketing your exported images from a single raw file. even if it looks bright in areas, the raw file preserves a lot of color data in anything that didn't blow out to full white (which the preview on my camera can warn me about, or the histogram can demonstrate it).

HDR lends itself well  to urban environments, i think, because it implies a high contrast, and deep, rich shadows, with sharp highlights. It lends itself well to a sort of edgy, and well... urban look to the subject. It helps make things look more like how you might perceive them in the world, since your eye will change it's aperture (:D) while you are looking at a scene to compensate for highlights and shadows while you are focusing on those elements.

Let me know what you think of my photo, and share your urban photography in the comments below!