Haulin Freight

I had so much fun taking yesterday's blip I decided to do another model train shot.

Photography certainly is evolving. In the days of film most of the final image was created in camera. Sure, masters like Ansel enhanced their work with, to use an overworked buzz word, post processing. But today, there is a radical shift toward manipulating the light we capture, now frozen in the digital domain, but ready to be thawed and tossed about. Like it or not, the toddlers today and photographers of tomorrow, will redefine the art of photography as we old timers understand it.

For you geekno tecknos this is what I did. Five year old Nikon D200 with the 18 - 200 mm lens zoomed to 125mm equivalent focal length. On a tripod and set to f16. Even so, the depth of field is extremely shallow, so 11 exposures were taken, manually refocusing incrementally. The images were combined using Helicon Focus to produce a sharp image throughout. Lucis Pro 6 processing brings out detail by manipulating local contrast. Perspective cropping in Photoshop and the Spherical correction in Pixel Bender (freeware plug-in on Adobe website) enlarged the foreground, reduced the background sizing. Finally, a levels adjustment layer to darken and selective burning-in on its mask, followed by a high pass filter layer with overlay blending to tweak sharpness, produced the result.

Look at this LARGE