The Gas Holder

After the detailed and classical composition of yesterday's blip, tonight's goes down solely to graphic shapes and patterns.

I'd often been tempted to photograph this structure at night, it's not lit and the street lamps come on and go off intermitedly, presumably to save energy and money. When on, the backlit bush, which is in the final throws of autumnal colour, really stood out.

Exposure was going to have to be long - 13 seconds, greatly overexposing above what the meter said (I always do these sort of pics on manual) - simply get any detail in the background structure.

The extreme brightness of the lamp gave lots of flare and I tried it at the lens' (Nikkor 17-35mm f2.8, at 35mm) maximum aperture, also, which gave a completely different flare-trace, but I went for this as the increased depth of field of the f16 was better for the ironwork.

And, yes, I have altered it, a little. Well, quite a lot, actually, but in bits and stages rather than anything extreme. Mind you, the list might go on a bit:

Open RAW file, spot image for bits of dust and other bodies, crop image, many stages of darkening, contrast increase, the colour change was simply made by sliding the colour hue slider to cyan (originally it was dark orangey brown), then opened in lens distortion folder, add fair bit of pincushion distortion, increase the vignetting brightness to its maximum (giving the darker centre and lighter corners, opposite to original), then opened the shadows quite a lot, added contrast and added red only, to increase the effect of that tiny bit of the starburst, added a little sharpness. That might have been about it - I was doing it all whilst watching a film on TV,so memory might have lapsed..

Yes, it is apocalyptic, LSD'ish (so I've heard!) but you can get away with that more with a simple, graphic shape, usually the simpler the better. All this editing improves with practice of course and when it all comes to something a bit decent, one is far more likely to try that technique again. I so rarely let myself go with Photoshop FX, the last time I did anything as outrageous was my blip entry for 21.09.

Oh, yes, the resulting 53mb PSD file was then converted to a jpeg, to upload onto our favourite site!

I've now edited, almost as creatively five more images of this structure that I took at the same time and are now up as an album on facebook. If you want to look, or to 'friend' me, send a request in the normal way - put Tim Kidner, Wiltshire, UK in and you should get my black & white Avebury stone circle image as my pic (as found on my profile, here). Any blip member can do likewise, whether they wish to see these, or not, or for whatever reason!