This photo was taken looking into the historical woodworking shop at Errdig Hall near Wrexham in North Wales.
It was just a grab shot, taken as I walked by en route to the gardens, with no careful set up, no tripod, no filters and no bracketing of exposures. The only thing in its favour was that I shot it in RAW format, not JPG, which allowed me to manipulate the image quite heavily in post production.
What caught my eye as I walked past were the beautiful detail and colours in the old wood and tools, lit rather harshly by the window light streaming down onto the scene. Of course, my God designed eye/brain combination could take in all the contrast and colours in one go, but the poor old camera (Canon EOS 350D in this case) didn't have a chance.
I'd been pondering for a while on how to bring out the feeling from this image when I happened upon an internet article in which the photographer had processed a similar image, taken in an abandoned American mining town, using heavy duty HDR techniques to overcome the same problems I was having.
So I set to with my single RAW file and made four differently exposed TIFF versions which I ran through Photomatix HDR software to give me the version of the scene shown here. I wasn't as aggressive in my use of HDR as the American example as I didn't want the 'halo' effect that overdone HDR produces.
I'm really pleased with how this has turned out, with a lovely warm glow coming out of the scene, which is how I experienced it at the time.
Filename - workshop 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 350D
Lens - 18-55mm zoom @ 18mm
Exposure - 1sec @ f11, ISO100
Location - Errdig Hall, North Wales
This image - 640x800px JPEG
Conversion - Photomatix, ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - HDR processing used to acheive tonal range.
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