First post on DG HDR tracks

Jabfinger

Hi all,
First post on the forums. I am somewhat new to photography, been lurking for months and finally decided to take the plunge:clap
I was out looking for graffiti the other day and came by this old under pass so I stopped and snapped a few shots. I know what I think about em but would appreciate the good the bad and the ugly from the Dgriners.

Thanks and looking forward to learning more.

Jack'll do

First off welcome to dgrin. Looking forward to seeing a lot more from you. Keep working in HDR, experiment and develop a style that suits YOU and that YOU like. Some others will like them and some will not. C'est la vie!

Nice treatment here. I really like the composition in #2 What conversion program did you use? Is this a multi-image or single image conversion? Did you do any PP in PS after tone mapping?

Richard

Hi there and welcome to Dgrin . The good in these is that they are well composed and have interesting textures and light. The processing needs some work, IMO. It looks as if you are trying too hard to maintain all the detail using local contrast, but you are neglecting the next step, which is to adjust the overall contrast. You would get much more drama out of both of these if you raised the black point considerably. Don't get too hung up about plugging some of the shadows--they're not all that interesting. The other thing that I wonder about is, where did all the color go? Did you desaturate all but the most saturated bits? While I like the predominance of monotone in these, a little more color would add interest.

Jabfinger

Hello guys,
Thank you for the warm welcome and of course taking the time to CC my photos.

Jack'll do I also favor the composition in #2 but I like the light in #1. I think I arrived at just the right time to capture the light hitting the tracks and although this was unplanned it will cause me to give light and time of day more thought in the future. I used Lumince an Open Source program by Davide Anastasia to combine the three shot's and tone map the image. I used Lightroom for the final.

Richard its funny and ironic you mention

where did all the color go

. It's been so gloomy here in Pennsylvania due to a what seems like such a long winter with sooooo much overcast skie. I was driving around trying to find graffiti to shoot that day just because it has so much color and what do I do when I get home, I strip out the color lol. Maybe all the gray days had an effect on how I finalized these photos. Actually though, If you look at the upper third of #2 you will see a sort of foggy haze. I did not see this as I was taking the shot but it became quite apparent after the tone mapping. As I was finalizing in Lightroom I tried to do a balancing act between color and unsightly fog.