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How I Photographed Historic Cotton & Wool Mills

On April 6, I was up in Lawrence, Massachusetts for the first ever Historic Mill Photo Workshop.

While shooting in the mills, I knew that I would want to bracket my photographs in order to create dramatic images showing both the inside and outside of the mills.

I have not used the HDR technique in a very long time, and although I did photograph some brackets specifically for HDR, I used a different approach for most of the day.

Enjoy the video below.

So as you can see, I photographed two exposures for the most part. The first exposure was for the interior and the second was for the exterior. Then in onOne Software’s Perfect Photo Suite 7 I am able to apply some masking to the windows in order to bring back some details outside of the mills.

As you viewed in the video I also had a neutral density filter on the lens. I did that to cut back some of the light, creating longer exposures. I was also using Bob Lussier‘s 20mm Nikon lens, which is amazing!

Here is the result from the scene you viewed in the video.

Gear: Nikon D800 & 20mm f/2.8
Exif: ISO 100, 20mm, f/11, 3 sec & 1/4
Processing: onOne Software Perfect Layers, Perfect Effects & Adobe Lightroom

Thanks for reading and happy shooting,

Scott

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Comments

2 responses to “How I Photographed Historic Cotton & Wool Mills”

  1. Excellent results Scott! Well done!

    1. Thanks, Jim. I have an alternative processing as well that I might share at a later date.

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