Darkroom Challenge Digital Darkroom Derby #010 – Winners Announced

Hendrik

Veteran
Location
Massachusetts
Welcome to the Digital Darkroom Derby #010, a digital image editing/processing challenge. The rules are here. Please read them.

Challenge ends on Sunday, 23 January at 10:00 am EST (UTM -5).

For this iteration, we'll stay with architecture in scenic situations. Here we have the mid-19th C. Roxbury Carpet Mill in Saxonville, MA. The point of view is from a third floor window elsewhere in the complex. Enjoy!

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That time when the sky and interior lighting are in balance. The sun is down but there is still a prominent glow evident on a few west-facing surfaces. The stormy weather earlier has mostly broken up, leaving shreds of clouds still lit up by the sun below the horizon. The lighting will pass in a minute or three.

I’ve both loved and struggled with this image ever since I took it over eleven years ago. The colors are attractive (mostly), even yummy. But the D90 at iso800 is not the most stellar performer in today’s terms. How convenient that current software is up to the task! The image’s demerits are several. It is not exposed to the right. Instead, it was exposed so that the rear LCD matched the sky, but that didn’t do the general noisiness any favors. It also buries in shadows details that were far more evident in person. The camera doesn’t show it but I was reacting in those couple of minutes where things are getting darker by the minute but you can still see everything very clearly. That’s the difference between a camera’s dynamic range and human perception. It would have been a candidate for discreet HDR. At that time I may also have been experimenting with uni-white balance, which IIRC involved a healthy green boost so that the histogram of the jpg would approximate that of the raw. Consequently, the green cast could come back to bite as it may have done in the ugly interior lighting. And last, the 24-85 f2.8-4D is a broadly useful lens but it is no architectural lens. I do not like the way in which the rectangular brickwork feature on the tower at left is rendered as a not-quite paralellagram.

Every entry displayed thought and had its own merits. Congratulations, all. I really enjoyed this little conversation. Sadly, the rules say I have to place value on the input.

Second runner-up @kae1
First runner-up @WhidbeyLVR

Winner @RichardC

Over to you, Richard.
 
DDD #011 is up and running:

 
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