I think that this looks like a bunch of very large presents around the base of a very weird Christmas tree. Maybe, in a way, it is.

The story: We were under the eastbound side of the west seattle bridge, by that foundry/forge because the lure of glowing ingots of raw steel was enough to risk hypothermia. After a while, Toby says, wow, look this direction, and there’s this great stymetrical array of lights and containers with a backdrop of the city and the needle. It’s kind of a weird view and hard to place, but we’re looking northeast across Elliott bay and harbor island. This is 9 frames covering +/- 4 EV, so the low is 1/8th, the 0 is 2 seconds and +4 is at 30 seconds. Shot with the manual focus 180mm ED (from 1974!) at f/8, hdr pre-merge in lightroom (adjust wb, minimal sharpening, minimal NR (use radius below .8 with high masking for hdr pre-proc), defringe, de-CA. 16-bit AdobeRGB tifs->Photomatix with detail enhancer, open in photoshop. They are shining this damn green-tinted light on the space needle these days and it bugs me, so made that look more like the eye sees it, adjusted the overall tonal levels/contrast so the background lights didn’t get lost, didn’t really need to sharpen or denoise but I did it anyway. Looked dark when I saw it in the daytime because I processed it at night, bumped the lows in lightroom and there ya have it. The foreground lights look like they were done in Maya…it’s the haze I guess, and the symetry, that does it.

By: Michael Holden