Very few real streets look like this. In fact, if you are watching a movie or TV show and see a street in the midel of a city that either dead ends, or ends with either an L intersection or T intersection, it is almost certainly a set. City streets tend not to have such a configuration. In Manhattan, almost every street ends on the water. Sets use these arrangements because it shortens the horizon and allows for shorter sets. This street, nevertheless, is completely real.
Processing this yesterday image was fun. I shot these brackets 8 months ago. It was a quick pre-work photo walk, and everything was hand held. I published a lot of shots from that day, but could not make this shot work. Finally yesterday I thought: how about giving black and white a try? So I pulled it into Nik Silver Efex and ended up processing with the neutral settings plus a color filter applied (I forget which but it was almost certainly red or green). Then I pulled that into Color Efex to do some Tonal Contrast filter adjustments, and here it is.
Except for one other thing I forgot. I actually shot 2 series of 9-exposure hand held brackets (I’m not kidding) that day. There were 3 people in the street. They did not move quickly enough for me to mask them out of either bracket set, but, after I did the PhotoMatix processing on one set, I pulled the result into Photoshop. Then I copied the neutral image from the other set of brackets in as a layer. The Photoshop Align Layers command is almost magical in its ability to align layers, even though I clearly moved between the two sets of brackets. Given the several seconds of time lapse between each set of brackets, I was able to mask out the people altogether and create the illusion of a completely empty street.
Below is a result straight from PhotoMatix that I prepared several months ago. You can perhaps see why I was unhappy with the color results, and can definitely see the people walking around.
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Jim Denham
14 Nov 2010Love this one Mark. The detail is really highlighted by removing the color! Well done!
Timo
14 Nov 2010Awesome picture! Black and white was definitely the right choice here!
James Howe
14 Nov 2010I love this in black & white. Great conversion, you’ve got some nice deep blacks and some wonderful highlights that aren’t blown out. The only technical issue I see is some noise in the sky, but I don’t know how easy it would be to clean that up. Everything else is superb.
mark
15 Nov 2010IThanks everyone for the comments. The noise appeared straight out of the Silver Efex Pro conversion, and got much worse after I ran the image through the Tonal Contrast filter. I used a mask to at least get it back to the limited amount in the Silver Efex layer. I did not want to do more because I was concerned that any noise reduction filter would affect some of the lines and detail in he rest of the image. I think the next time, if I can remember, I should run noise reduction on the image after HDR conversion but before the BW conversion in Silver Efex Pro. I think the noise was there, but wasn’t visible until the BW conversion, and if the noise reduction caused any loss of detail at that point, I could always try to add it back in.
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