Madnessmatrix | Eric Bowers Photography

One tripod mounted RAW // HDR // Shutter: 4 sec. // Aperture: f/18 // Focal Length: 17 mm // ISO 400

Here I had set up for a bit in the stairwell of one of the Plaza garages, in front of the many pseudo bars of ornation (to see last year’s totally different shot from nearly the same location click here). Several nights ago I whittled away the depraved hours of the darkness in a relentless dither trying to work multiple, differently exposed RAWs of this scene into one HDR but somehow correct for all the overlayed motion blur of the cars with multiple different long exposures. Somehow that night, sense pervaded and I gave up. Coming back tonight I just did it the old simple way of tone mapping from a single RAW and saying to hell with the rest. Yeh, no one has ever accused me of not manipulating my photos enough.

In the end there was enough giddiness amid the mental cobwebs about the whole thing that I had to save a couple different final edits of this shot. Mainly I had in mind the color version, because of the whole hoo-haa over the Plaza lights. But the black & white treatment was honestly more interesting to me than the color one. So I took the B&W and horizontally reversed it so as not to promote too much of a repetition in case the color version forthcomes.