Wandering downtown San Francisco with two photographic companions we decided to visit the San Francisco Cable Car Museum. This turned out to be a great location for monochromatic HDR photography. The deck inside the museum overlooks the huge engines and always-turning wheels that run through underground tunnels to power San Francicsco’s cable cars. Who could resist this kind of subject matter?

Cable Car Wheels © Harold Davis

To create this image, I shot four exposures, all at 62mm, f/32, and ISO 100, using my tripod. Shutter speeds of the four exposures were 4 seconds, 8 seconds, 15 seconds, and 30 seconds.

I combined the exposures using Nik HDR Efex Pro and hand-HDR in Photoshop. Within HDR Efex Pro, I used several custom presets that I have created.

I worked on the blended image in Photoshop, primarily using filters from Nik and from the Topaz Adjust filter set.

Once I was satisfied with the image in color, I converted to monochromatic using a layered combination of Photoshop B&W adjustment layers and conversions created using Nik Silver Efex 2 presets. As a final touch, I layered in a monochromatic HDR conversion from HDR Efex Pro at a low opacity.

How is digital workflow like a sausage? We want to enjoy the results, but perhaps we are not so enthusiastic about seeing inside the factory and how the sausage (or composite digital image) was actually made.