Headed back to the hotel after a day out, the plan was to grab my bags from the hotel and head back to the Union Station to catch the Southwest Chief. But on the bus ride back towards Pershing Square, I saw it, the Queen Mother of iconic Los Angeles transit shots - perfectly lit, bathing in Southern California sunshine. I knew I had to get a photo of it!
In hindsight, I don't know why I didn't bail out then and there to get the shot. Perhaps I had already mentally committed to my destination. Instead, I elected to proceed as scheduled, but make an intermediate stop on the trip back to the train station. Big mistake.
By the time I arrived back at Spring and 1st Streets, the enchanting sunlit shot opportunity was now just a memory. The once fully illuminated buses running along Spring Street were now cloaked in a canyon of shadow, yet the L.A. City Hall was still glowing with reflected sunshine. Feeling irritated and defeated, I snapped off a few mediocre shots of what I could manage in the terribly lit scene, before trundling over to get the train out of town.
Coincidentally, around this time, I had begun dabbling with HDR Photography Imaging (a topic of a future post) and had downloaded a software product that did HDR imaging. With nothing to be lost, I decided to try a novel experiment.
A typical HDR image is composed from three to five bracketed photo exposures. The process involves something to the degree of pulling details out (from the overexposed shots) in what would typically be lost in a normal exposure, and combining it with the tonal range (from the underexposed shots) that would typically be blown out in a normal exposure, and creating a single exposure that retains the colors of the original scene and still has the details of the shadowed areas.
However, when all one has is a single shot to work with, it is not possible to combine exposures, or is it?
The fun of modern technology. Using something as simple as Google's Picasa software, I elected to save two alternative versions of the photo, one of which had the "fill light" in the shadowed portion significantly bumped up to emulate an "overexposure" and the other with the "shadows" brought out to create a dark photo with some rich photo tones.
I then loaded the three images in the HDR software and combined them to create a new image, that, while hardly the sun drenched image I had initially hoped to capture at this intersection, was at least a lot more bearable than the original. At some point, I will have to return to get the initial photo I had wanted, but for now this will do.
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