Wanna Dock?

--Lannie

Lannie,  Excellent!  Great colors, composition, and sharpness.  Is this a water tower?   Larry

Thank you, Larry.  Yes, it is actually two water towers.

--Lannie

This file was deliberately grossly underexposed, due to the mix of types of very bright light, especially one extraordinarily bright source of light hidden entirely behind the central pillar.  It was not only very, very bright, but was of a different frequency from other sources.  There was no way I saw to work with it except by hiding it.  Its effects were still very bright reflections throughout much of the photo.  Alas, some parts of the photo were driven into gross underexposure by this technique,and the challenge finally became to get anything at all out of it as posterization and strong shadow noise started to appear in the areas that were underexposed.

I had no idea what I would get by underexposing to such a degree in this case, if indeed anything useable would result due to the excess of data in certain areas combined with a great paucity of data in others.  The precise mix of colors continued to change with more processing, and posterization and other side effects almost made me discard this file before one last step produced this totally unexpected result.  In this case, I could not begin to recount the steps used.  I was down to, "Lemme try a few other things before I toss it or start all over."

I have a few other brighter exposures made from the same angle.  I might try those.  I might also try to reshoot from this angle again, given that these two water towers are less than four miles from my house.  I suspect that, given that one very bright light (combined with other sources and types of lighting), each exposure would have its own challenges.

I might also try manipulating the raw file differently so as to use the same file again with a different mix of techniques.  I have no formula for exposing or processing such unique cases as this. 

--Lannie

Here is another crop (and different treatment entirely) from the same raw file.

--Lannie

Perfectly exposed in my view. Works well as abstract too. 

Thank you, John.

Here is another crop from the same file.  Below that, one can see the original as a resized JPEG.

--Lannie