Sunny Boy Cereal

[Tzetsin]

Just wanted to share a little piece of home town history. Sunny Boy Cereal was founded in 1929, Not sure when this building went up. Its shut down now as the product is now made in Edmonton.

I didn't set out to do a special piece on this building. I was driving around drinking a coffee and listening to some tunes and I noticed it and thought it would be a good subject.

I shot the building in a number of ways, i did a vertical panorama with a polarizer, an HDR horizontal panorama, a full on wide angle shot, an HDR wide angle shot and a straight on down low HDR fish eye shot. Guess which one this is ;D I'd love to get this shot with a polarizer to remove the window glare and see inside better, but alas, fisheye means no polarizer.



Anyone who's ever used a fisheye will tell you that if you want a "usable" image with the lens its pretty damn tough. The distortion is incredible. Architecture work is almost always known for its perfect perspectives and straight lines, so using a fisheye seems pretty retarded. Fortunately, I've never claimed to be a photographer. I'm a self proclaimed "photographic artist". That means that if it doesn't look "real", I don't give a sh!t ;D

I did a number of processes on this shot, firstly was the HDR merge. 3 images into the processor made a pretty flat, boring and completely uninspired piece. Pretty normal as far as it goes but necessary to get the inside detail.

Second step was to fire it up in PS. First thing I did there was run the warp tool and stretch and pull and prod and kick and scream and yoink it into something that resembled what I had in mind. No small feat... Next came some run of the mill edits, brightness, contrast, levels, curves, that kind of thing. Why all that if I'm just going to make it black and white? Because I do my black and whites by hand, not with an image processor. Every seperate color and subject gets seperate work, so having good contrast and color seperation makes life a lot easier. After about 20 black and white layers I made a copy of the cumulative work and went after it with the dodge and burn tools to try and make it pop.

I always go for a 3D look with my black and whites, some have more success than others. This isn't one of the success stories unfortunatley. Its still kind of fun though.

Anyhoo, hope you enjoy the image.

Tz

[Heaterguy]

I like the shot and I like the distortion a fisheye produces. Why own one otherwise, IMHO.
If you feel a need to correct distortion you might try ShiftN software. It's a free download.
ShiftN