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Posted by
Jeffrey (Scottsdale, United States) on 28 May 2017 in Cityscape & Urban and Portfolio.

Location: Scottsdale, AZ

When Abby (my dog) and I left the house late this past Monday night, the wind was blustery, so I decided to skip taking any photos with plants and trees in them -- with the long exposures and median-blending process that I use, they'd have ended up being a blurry mess in the final photos -- and we walked to a light industrial park that's nearby to photograph some warehouses and office buildings instead.

Several of the scenes I photographed had buildings with at least one security light that had a dying bulb, so they kept blinking on and off instead of staying lighted continuously.

In the case of this scene, the light on the side of the building would stay on only long enough for me to take one photo, but it stayed off long enough for me to take two photos. Since I needed to take seven photos for my median-blending process and I didn't know exactly when the light would blink on or off, I simply photographed the scene continuously, without regard to whether the light was on or off. As such, I ended up with enough raw photos that I was able to process it either way: with the light on and with it off.

My initial intention was to photograph it with the light on, but after I compared the two versions, I found I preferred the "off" version, which is the one that I've posted above.

Unfortunately, some of the delightful subtleties in the shadow areas (such as details of the gate) have gone missing during the transition from a 16-bit .TIF file in the ProPhoto color space to a compressed, 8-bit, sRGB .JPG, but take my word for it: When viewed on a large-gamut, high-res monitor in its original 16-bit form, this photo looks absolutely gorgeous!

A larger, higher-resolution version of this photo can be seen here: http://www.canyonero.com/files/1495718539.jpg