This is my first picture to be processed from London Open House on 19th and 20 September 2015. There is a great Atrium at the Angel Building, Islington with a black sculpture in the centre. It is called Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness by Ian McChesney. The shape of the piece was generated by allowing treacle to fall from a spoon – the resulting form is then inverted resulting in a point. The spoon at the base is formed from a seating area allowing me to lie on in to take this shot.

The number visiting was quite small thus avoiding the dreaded queues so common at Open House . After viewing the Atrium from the ground floor there were regular tours taking the lift to view it from the top floor and to take in the view from the roof. The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 mm lens at 10mm.. In the camera 3 raw images 2EV spacing for HDR. The last image was used in Camera Raw to create 2 additional brighter exposures so 5 in all. Outputted in Photomatix using contrast optimiser preset for a natural look.

My first edit was to bring more light into the foreground than I could get with Photomatix by adding the plus 2 EV image as a new layer, masking it off and then adding it back over parts of the foreground with a white brush at varying opacity. More detail was brought in using Topaz Clarity and noise reduced using Topaz DeNoise.

Conversion to mono was done with Topaz B&W Effects 2 using a contrast detail preset.