Making Lemonade

There’s a saying that goes something like “If God hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

And of course there is the Jimmy Buffett/Parrothead corollary – “If God hands you limes, make Margaritas!”

This story below is an example of making lemonade from lemons… or, if you prefer, Margaritas from limes.

Late Saturday night we made the decision to head to Sand Island (in Bethlehem, PA) early Sunday morning in order to photograph sunrise coming up behind the industrial ruins of Bethlehem Steel. I though it would make a splendid composition and a wonderful image. We got to Sand Island before 0500, about 45 minutes before sunrise. We went to the spot where I want to shoot from and much to my delight, I found the water level in the Lehigh River low enough that I could easily make my way out into the river for the perspective that I wanted. Unfortunately that was the last thing to go right. I no sooner got set up when a train (the plant is dead, well except for the casino built on the brownfields, but the train tracks are still active) headed right into the composition and came to a dead stop. As I waited and hoped that the train would move on I came to the realization that I had misjudged where the sun would rise (bad planning on my part). Oh I was pointed in the right direction but this time of year the sun rises more northeast than I was pointing. On top of that, what little color there was in the sky was totally diffused in haze that was not going to burn off soon. My vision of a sunrise over the stacks went down the drain fast.

As I stood there thinking about the family members (my father, both grandfathers, four uncles) who toiled for Bethlehem Steel, I decided I might as well make a few images before closing up shop and heading home. So I made two five-image HDR series of images –  a total of 10 images. When I got home, I processed the images in Photomatix Pro (for HDR) before going into Nik and processing the image in Dfine (noise reduction) and Viveza 2 (to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and structure) before moving into Color Efex Pro and using the Graduated Neutral Density filter there in an effort to pull some color out of the sky. It wasn’t working. here’s what the image looked like when I was about to give up.

… then the idea of black and white hit me. I went back into Nik and used Silver Efex Pro to convert the image to B&W and then used the Vignette Blur filter in Color Efex Pro to create the vignetting effect. Finally, I sharpened the image using Nik Sharpener Pro. (Have I said how much I love the Nik Complete suite .)

Here’s the finished product. Much more dramatic. And, I think, a really nice keeper image out of what looked to be a wasted morning. What do you think?