The Elephant Gate (Elefantporten) in the old Carlsberg brewing facility.

On my way home from a speech on photography I gave, for a photo club, I drove by the old Carlsberg brewing facility. I knew of the existence of this Elephant Gate, but I had never seen it. I turned the car around and went up there. Despite a light drizzle, I got out and shot some shots.

About the processing

When I post-processed this HDR photo, the Elephants didn’t become as prominent as I had hoped. The lights from the gate it self has a yellowish glow to it, and the elephants, even though they were wet, also had a slight yellow glow to it.

I wasn’t quite happy with the photo, and then I did what I often do with a photo, that I feel, hasn’t met it’s potential yet. I leave it. Then I go back a week, a month or even longer, and see if my creativity sparkles. In this case I waited a fortnight, and then I got the idea of increasing the exposure and removing all color from the elephants, and the balcony above them. This way, they get a much stronger role to play in the photo, and I felt that the potential was met, and I was happy.

One of the exposures completely unprocessed.

As you can see in the image above, the gate in the far end is completely white (blown out). This is because the camera can not capture all light in one exposure. There is too much difference between the light areas and the dark areas in the photo. It is quite dark from where I am shooting while the yard inside the gates in lit up. Because the camera can’t have it in one shot, I did 5 shots and merged them together into a High Dynamic Range photo (HDR), using my HDR workflow (read about it right here).

These are my 5 original unprocessed shots:

Notice how the gate is in the first image is perfectly exposed while the elephants are completely black. And in the last image, it is the elephants that are perfectly exposed. Combining them, gives an image that is perfectly exposed all over.

I as good as always use Photomatix to merge my photos into one. Photomatix does a ‘tone mapping’, which also applies some effect on the photo. And in this case, I took the output of Photomatix and used that as input, and then did a double tone mapped image. There is a button in Photomatix for this. You can read about doing double tone mapped images in this post. The trick is not to overdo anything. The double tone mapped image, will be way too wild and crazy. Do NOT use it straight out of Photomatix. Instead, blending it gently in Photoshop or Gimp, with the original exposures and the single tone mapped image, and you can get a nice effect, as I have on the bricks in this photo.