My Harbor Hotel Process

So many people over the weekend have commented, both on filckr and in real life about how much that they loved this photo, I thought I would share the process with people that process that I used to create it, because lets face it without people sharing techniques and ideas everyone would just get stale.  It is also quickly becoming my favorite photos!

[flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgman5/3428833139/[/flickr]

Step one was getting up at 5:30am.  It helped that my project team is under a huge deadline and amounts of stress so I have been going into the office early anyways.  My office is just down the street from this building so in walking there from the subway the day before I noticed the angle of the sunrise on Thursday morning and had feeling that i would be able to frame it through the arch, and what do you know when I got there the next morning I was right.  My first shots, I set up my tripod across the street, with my 24-70 on my 5D mark 2 wanting to shoot the building as a whole.  The problem was there was a contractor sitting in his pickup truck parked right in the middle of the arch, talking to someone, and they didn’t leave for what seemed like 20 minutes and the sun was starting to rise fast.

After the truck left I shot this photo which is the exact same process that I will explaining, then I ran across the street and setup the arch shot

[flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgman5/3428604645/[/flickr]

So after I composed the shot, using my Canon EF 15mm Fisheye, on my Canon 5d mark II, I shot a series of brackets.  Five in total to be exact.  My first series of brackets seemed to blow out the highlights to much so the following settings were used on the camera.

• ISO 50
• Shade White Balance
• Aperture Priority
• f/4.0
• Exposure Value -2
• first set of brackets was +/- 2 and the second was +/- 1, so combined with my -2 EV, I shot brackets of -4, -2, 0, 2, 4

After importing in to Adobe Lightroom, I selected the 5 exposures that I wanted to use, out of all the frames I shot, and exported to Photomatix.  For people using Photomatix 3 and Lightroom 2 this is extremely easy all you have to do is, Right Click > Export > Photomatix and it will export and launch Photomatix.  Here is a screen shot of my setting for Photomatix to import my RAW files for processing, amd as you can see:

• Generate HDR and check on Reduce Chromatic aberrations
• Check go directly to Tone Mapping
• Check Align Source Images and select the radio button for By Matching Features
• Color space is Adobe RGB (what the camera was set to)
• Auotmatically re-import into Lightroom and stack with the first photo
• and Save as a 16 bit TIFF

Once inside the tone mapping of Photomatix, I use the Detail Enhancer and I only deal with the top of the Panel:

• I set the Strength to 85
• The Saturation w as set to 67
• Luminosity 0
• Light Smoothing all the way to very high

The reason I only touch these setting is that I am only really concerned with color blending

between exposures at this

point and once back in Lightroom I do the rest of my adjustments.  Click Process and you are back in Lightroom ready to finish the job

In Lightroom I have a preset which I have been working on, and it sort of mimics

Kodachrome film, this preset adjusts

colors, brightness/contrast, vibrance, exposure, and the tone curve.  This is by no means a one click solution, after I applied the preset I messaged the values that it adjusted, and then went into Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush and selectively dodged and burned areas of the photos, if you look at the final image and the image above from my Photomatix settings you will see one of the biggest adjustments was brightening the area under the front arch.  I also slightly darkened the sky.  A few more tweaks and then some sharpening, and I was done.

I am glad you all have enjoyed this photo as much as I have and I hope that this explanation helps you better understand my process.

Jeff