I photographed this storefront on several different occasions while in Brooklyn, New York. During my latest visit I was in the company of our friend David Mills a BPN  (Bird Photographers Net ) moderator in the Landscape Forum and the current President of the NJFCC, as well as with my faithful date… my hubby Anthony.

I photographed it as  an HDR (high dynamic range) series,  in order to capture as much of the details in the outside as well as in the inside of the store. I also wanted to be able to bring out most of the colors that one is able to bring out when tone-mapping various exposures in an Hdr software.

While in a rush I selected the wrong set of exposures to tone map in Nik HDR Effex Pro. This was the first series I had taken and had clipped the molding on the left side of the window due to the fact that I was unable to back up any further, without getting hit by a car in the middle of the street. For the subsequent series I changed my angle and moved more to my left and was able to include the entire section.

At any rate I saved the tone-mapped image and thought it would be quicker for me to add canvas in Photoshop and recreate the missing side on the left, than to go thru the whole process again. I did just that but was not totally moved with the image at this point. So I decided to tryout a couple of things.

I used Topaz Adjust and tweaked the settings here and there until it was starting to look somewhat better for me. I then decided to take into the Filter Forge Plugin and see what I could come up with. I used at least 3 of the filters, changing blending modes and opacities in Photoshop. I then proceeded to do a few more tweaks to it while in Photoshop, using brushes and a few other tools (the old fashioned way) to finish the look I was after.

At the end I was happy with my results and although it is a far cry from my original capture I was satisfied to have photographed a scene with a particular vision in mind and ended up with a totally different result.

I guess my point is that things happen for a reason and it’s good to be able to go with the flow.

Below is the middle exposure image ROOF from the HDR set of images.