Coming from the east, going to Mount Washington means crossing the Liberty bridge and up PJ McArdle roadway. The road climbs the two hundred feet from the bridge to the top of the cliff in .8 miles. That comes out to close to a 4% grade.
Crossing McArdle roadway about halfway up is the Mon incline. The incline itself travels over 360 feet up the hill from the south side to Grandview Avenue. The incline was built in 1870 to carry steelworkers to their homes on top of the hill. There were many inclines in Pittsburgh and now only two remain, the Mon and the Duquesne.
So last Saturday I was driving up McArdle Road, like I have in the past so many times, the sun caught the autumn leaves leaving a tunnel of gold around the incline rail. I was thinking this was the shot of the day.
There is no parking along the road, so a half mile walk down and half mile walk back up was in order. No problem there.
Now that the logistics part is over, setting up for the picture is next. I though the best shot would be shooting from downhill going uphill. This was due to sun position. In reality, that didn't work out so well. The best shot by far was shooting from uphill - looking downhill. I'll have to deal with the sun issues later.
I shot this with the D500, still testing. And as such, I configured the camera to save the RAW file to the primary card and a JPG to the secondary card. So I have a JPG for comparison. That usually doesn't happen.
A side note, this is why I shoot RAW and process my own shots.
To be fair, the JPG settings I used are very base and bland. As a general rule, I just don't do JPG. The camera will do 'better' if configured for vivid colors and in camera HDR.
This shot has so much potential, but needs a lot of 'help' work.
Clearly the sky is blown. After that, there are some distractions. I'm not sure about the 35 MPH sign - because it belongs. Also the street lamp is an eye catcher. Again, it belongs, but..... Down the road, there is an orange detour sign that doesn't belong. That's easy removal. There's also a sign on the protective fence that could be removed.
In the end, I decided if the removal was clean that all these items needed to go. The subject is the incline car and the gold leaves. I also like the stained concrete on the right. The correct light on the concrete could really help. Other than those subjects, the rest needed to go.
As to the sky, I wanted to keep it all Pittsburgh. I have plenty of shots with sky. So, it will be ethical to 'correct' this Pittsburgh sky with another Pittsburgh sky from the same area on the same day. Right?
All the object removals went fine, even the big 35 MPH sign. Very happy with that.
To mask out the sky, I used On One.
The process in On One was less than ten minutes, where if I had used PS, it would have been considerably longer.
When I added the Pittsburgh sky, I still needed to work on the overall light levels. For that I used Photomatix. I wasn't going for a HDR look, just wanted to bring up the shadow light and colors a bit without looking over saturated. I used the Photographic filter.
This is the final image.
ISO 100, f/6.3, 1/100 sec, 35 mm
D500/18-200 f/3.5-5.6
The sky part wasn't a slam dunk. I had to lighten it a bit. The mask work on the car was a bit tedious, but finally got it to a point where I liked it. The reflection of the sky in the car windows was interesting.
Although I had to work to get in a spot to take this image, and had to work it a bit in post processing - I was extremely lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
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