2011: 11/365 Faux

11 FEB 2011

Day 11 was my birthday, and my original intention was to take and post a birthday-related photo. When a different opportunity presented itself, I abandoned that idea altogether. I should probably add that abandonment of the birthday idea wasn't a disappointment. These days, I still have a love-hate relationship with my birthday, though it's not as bad as it was a few years back. But I digress.

Whenever we go to the Home Depot/Target/Petsmart side of town, we always pass this little abandoned building. I've wanted to photograph it for quite some time, but have never had the opportunity. Until Day 11.

It wasn't a great photographic opportunity. It wasn't like traffic magically lightened and allowed me to park and get out of my vehicle to carefully plan and execute the photo. Oh, no. That would make things too easy. What I got was a red light that put us next to the building while I was in the passenger seat of the car. When that happened, as quickly as I could, I opened the window, pointed the camera, and got a couple shots off. I only had time for two shots before traffic began to move again.

One of these days I'll find a way to stop over there, dodge traffic like a game of Frogger, and get a real photo session with that building.

When I looked at the photo, my first instinct was to convert it to black and white. I mean, doesn't it just scream old-timey black and white photo? But since my plan with Project 365 has always been to expand my horizons, I decided to go outside my comfort zone. The result you see is an attempt at faux HDR processing using Photoshop CS3 (hence, the post title).

I say faux because the process wasn't done with bracketed photos -- heck, it wasn't even done with RAW photos. I took a JPEG file, manipulated it three times in ACR, then used those files to follow the tutorial I found here.

I'm not entirely happy with the result; I still think it would have looked better in black & white. I may reprocess just to see. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming the tutorial, which was easy to follow. I blame myself. But...good or bad, right or wrong, I'm posting it here for all to see.