A New View of Ingles

A late night shopping spree at the Fletcher, NC Ingles grocery store, and, with my camera at my side 30 minutes before midnight, I decided to snap a couple of photos. In a rare [for me] moment of distraction, I did not have the camera set the way I had intended it. The image was 1 stop darker than I was planning on, but I didn’t notice it until I had left Ingles. I was able to fix the problem in Aperture, but I was still not happy with my result. I had intended on overexposing the shot by a stop and 1/2. So the darker look was actually the opposite result I was looking for! While I was able to compensate for the 1 stop underexposed, I was not able to get the bright results I was originally looking for in post.

So…I decided to embrace the darkness. I applied some heavy editing to the corrected original and gave it a feel that reminds me of a shot of Grand Central Station in NY. I’m not sure I like it, as I was really trying to focus on the bright lights and this takes that brightness and removes all signs of it. But it is an interesting look! What does the original photo look like? Well, the one I corrected so it would be less dark is going up on Flickr, and I’ll edit this post in a few minutes with the direct link to it so you can see the “before” and “after” [though the before image i am posting was already edited to correct my boneheaded -1 stop mistake].

EDIT: Here’s the original, corrected for underexposure, version: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vjl/5921431914/in/photostream