Van Hoosen Silo Flipped

[Dennis Bishop]

When I returned to Van Hoosen Farm last Friday, it was with a two-step folding step stool. The perch was precarious, but it allowed me and my tripod to be high enough to get the camera into the lowest silo opening not covered by plexiglass. The camera was tilted to make the sunlight pattern from the roofless top of the silo and its openings run diagonally between two corners.

nine exposure HDR at 1 EV intervals; Nikon D3s, ISO 200, f/22, zoom lens at 17mm

processing

• Photomatix tone mapping to achieve a good histogram
• Adobe Camera Raw -- Recovery, Clarity, some tweaking of colors in HSL
• The natural colors were gray and variable greenish yellows. The image was inverted in CS5 to give mostly bluish tones.
• Gradient Map adjustment layer -- blue/black/blue gradient
• Fractalius b&w preset at Multiply blend mode
• Alien Skin Snap Art -- Stylize Line Art at Divide blend mode to give white outlines
• cropped to give better shape to sunlit pattern from rooftop when flipped
• horizontal & vertical flips
• Emboss and Solarize filters
• cropped to put rooftop part centered on divine proportion lines and lower left diagonal at the corner
• transformed (compressed) horizontally to a golden rectangle
• four different Flypaper Textures textures -- largely purples, blues, and greens
• Topaz Simplify -- preset based on BuzSim but lower saturation
• Nik Color Efex -- Glamour Glow, Darken/Lighten Center
• Nik Silver Efex -- conversion to ambrotype and applied with reduced opacity

[John Storjohann]

My mind sometimes takes off on little flights of fancy...and for some reason, as soon as I opened this, I thought...Area 51. Don't ask me why...it just went there. I like the silver/gray tones..the repetitive lines, the textures, the rich patterns in the oval...good stuff going on here Dennis...keep it up!

[Andrew McLachlan]

Hi Dennis, this is a cool flip...love what you created here!

[Cheryl Slechta]

Dennis, this is very, very cool looking. I really like the toning and the composition. It has an outer space look to me that I like a lot - it really gets the imagination going. I've got some catching up to do so I need to look at your other silo posts.

[denise ippolito]

I really like the flip work and the filtering. I would love to see the original image you started with if you felt like sharing.

[Anita Bower]

I would have never guessed this was the silo. Nicely done.

[Dennis Bishop]

. . . I would love to see the original image you started with if you felt like sharing.

Thanks for your comments, Denise. And for asking to see the original. I really think that makes a lot of sense for most, if not all, the images in this forum. If it's alright and it won't bog down the system, I'd like to start doing that with mine.

It probably doesn't make sense to show one of the HDR exposures. This is the TIFF file out of Photomatix. I rarely do much, there, but optimize the histogram. My guess is that Strength was set at 100 and Lighting Adjustment (or something like that) was at 5. Everything else would've been at zero or the default values.

[denise ippolito]

Dennis, Thanks for sharing the starting image. It really puts into perspective the work you did!