On Sunday afternoon Anne and I decided to take a trip down hwy, 46 between hwy 1 and fwy. 101. We travel this road often and last year we did do a wine tasting at ROTTA Winery and a few others. This trip was on the 7th of March so the vines were still dormant and several vineyards were busy with workers grooming the vines in preparation for the years crop. As we drove up to one of the wineries tasting rooms we passed this stack of barrels entangled with vines. I told Anne that before we went into the winery we had to walk back up the road to shoot the old barrels before this black cloud passed over. This day the wind was strong and the clouds would briefly fill the sky hiding the harsh mid-day sun . We did need to wait a short time for the clouds to hide the bright sun which was now in front of us. This image started out as five exposures blended and tone mapped in Photomatix. Unfortunately the image lacked that strong contrast and rich color that I like to see in my hdr's so I decided to take this image into a different direction. My first choice was to turn it into a B&W so I brought it into Silver Efex Pro by Nik Software. HDR's can make nice B&W's as the strong rich colors can produce a good tonal contrast for B&W. After Silver Efex Pro I went into Vivenza from Nik software, then a special effect in Color Efex Pro. I most likely went backwards a few times as one treatment or effect wiped out the previous, but that's part of the creative process when you don't have a definitive direction. Each time my Macbook Pro would start to bog I would merge the layers until I reached a point where I said the heck with it added a few textures and called it done.
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