A few shots from my last trip up on the Tower Four crane. The crane is down now and Marcus has retired to Arizona. It sure was fun to be up there with him and to get a chance to see the world from his vantage point.
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Last Wednesday the Ironworkers placed a 12 foot diameter, 127 foot tall caisson in the pier near the Kentucky shore. It weighed over 170,000 pounds and was going in one of the deepest piers of the project. Watching them lift it from a horizontal position into a vertical position was amazing. It took two cranes to do it and the coordination required was incredible.
This HDR image is from a three frame handheld bracket set consisting of +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures. I took the three frames into NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 where I merged them and applied the Balanced preset. While there I set the Detail slider to accentuated and the Drama slider to deep. In order to suppress some serious halos that were showing up along the vertical elements in the sky I reduced the Method strength slider until the halos were gone. I then took the merged file back into Aperture 3 for final adjustments to colors, sharpening and contrast.
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Today I am sharing two versions of the same image. For the color image I used NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 to merge the three frame bracket set. I applied the default preset and then returned it to Aperture 3 for contrast and color adjustments.
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I decided to try OnOne Perfect B&W to convert the color HDR into a black and white HDR image. I started with the default B&W setting that OnOne Perfect B&W provided and tweaked it to adjust the contrast until it was the way I wanted it. Not much more I can say about this one.
