During my recent wanders around Port Dalhousie, Ontario (now just part of the regional city of St Catharines), I was photographing a number of buildings in the old core of the town, now closed and (apparently) at risk of falling to the tender mercies of developers. One of the buildings along Lakeport Road (facing the local marina) has a vintage store front framed in black and sporting a white door. Clearly in need of some tender loving care and with windows clad in paper, its days seem numbered. I originally toyed with the idea of doing this as a black-and-white image but after a few days of consideration, I opted to keep the colour mainly because of the door’s vandalism as well as the orange tape from the fallen-down notice on the window to the left of the door. Old Port Dalhousie – see it before it disappears. - JW
Date Taken: 2019-04-06
Tech Details:
Taken using a hand-held Olympus OM-D EM-5 fitted with an Olympus Zuiko 14-42mm M Zuiko 14-14mm EZ 1:3.5-5.6 lens set to 14mm, Intelligent Auto mode, Auto WB, ISO200, f/8.0, 1/320 sec. PP in free Open Source RAWTherapee from Olympus RAW/ORF source file: set final image width to be 8000px, apply horizontal perspective correction, apply pincushion distortion correction, level image, increase contrast and Chromaticity in LAB mode, enable Graduated Neutral Density/GND tool and rotate it to cover the sidewalk and steps of the building and then darken the lower part of the image to better match the tonal range of the rest of the image, enable Shadows/Highlights and recover highlight detail as well as some shadow detail, perform some white balance adjustment by using an eyedropper sample of the door/white as a reference, boost vibrance, apply a bit of noise reduction, sharpen (edges only), save. PP in free Open Source GIMP: use the levels tool auto adjustment to get a good base tonality, contrast and colour balance, duplicate the image to a new layer for sidewalk adjustment, add a black/transparent layer mask and then use white paint to paint in the sidewalk as well as the lighter patches of the steps on the mask, use the hue-saturation-brightness tool to decrease the red channel saturation of the sidewalk area, copy the base image to a new layer for use as blacks adjustment and then duplicate it again for creation of a blacks mask, use the threshold tool to isolate the blacks and then invert it so black areas come out as white, add a black/transparent layer mask to the blacks adjustment layer and copy the mask to the mask, adjust the contrast and brightness of the blacks layer to get a good tonal range in the blacks, use the dodge-burn tool in dodge and highlights mode and a large soft brush to dodge/brighten the chalk markings below the right side windows, create new working layer from visible result, sharpen, save, scale the image to 6000px wide, sharpen slightly, save, add fine black-and-white frame, add bar and text on left, save, scale image to 2048 wide for posting online, sharpen very slightly, save.
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