I spent most of the day driving and logged over 450 miles driving from Tucumcari, TX to Fort Worth, TX. I followed Route 66 until I got to Amarillo and made a quick stop at the Cadillac Ranch before putting the hammer down and driving the rest of the way to Fort Worth.
I shot the image above today. I was amused by the brown sludge that was at the bottom of the pool and thought it generally reflected the state of many of the buildings that are found along Route 66.
Ben, how much of your recent photo technique are you doing during RAW conversion vs. photoshop proper? I’m assuming quite a bit of burning is happening in PS, but was curious if you do most of the curves in ACR.
Hi Christopher,
I didn’t touch the raw settings on any of the images I’ve posted over the last few days. On occasion I will adjust the white balance, but otherwise it has nothing to do with camera raw. The only dodging/burning applied is a simple vignette to darken the edges of the image and in this case, I painted with black int eh upper right to darken an area where a roof line was coming into the frame in the upper right. The main thing that makes this all work is taking three exposures and combining them with photoshop and then processing the resulting file with Photomatix Pro.
You can sometimes get a similar look by moving both the Blacks and Fill Light sliders in Camera Raw to extremes.
I did apply a curve to the motel sign in this case since the letters were not as dark as I liked them.
-Ben