Going streaking

You know how sometimes you have a shot in your mind that you want and you are so busy thinking about setting up for it, but then another shot just jumps out at you that is even better than the first?  This was one of those times.  I had an idea to trek all along the Brooklyn Bridge and replicate a shot that I took earlier in the day, just at night.  As I was making my way the 3,000 feet halfway across the bridge, traffic started buzzing by me on either side and I just stopped and set up the tripod.  I thought it was pretty cool how the light trails on the left came out almost electric blue.

For the processing, I started with a five exposure HDR processed with Photomatix and then shipped over the CS5.  I ended up masking in the tonemapped +2 exposure for each side of the light trails, as the HDR had left some blown out areas that weren’t too appealing.  I was going to mask in the actual lights on the bridge, but I like the effect they had of getting brighter as the bridge went on, kind of like a tunnel of light.  Finally, I added a Pro Contrast layer in Color Efex, some slight noise reduction to the sky and a vignette on just the top of the sky to give it more of a dramatic effect.

Thanks for stopping by today, see you tomorrow.