I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of this little shack used to be, but I’m guessing it may have been where the scorekeeper used to sit during the game. It took a bit of creative maneuvering to get my tripod and camera into a decent position to take this shot. The door to the shack was not being particularly helpful, and I kept getting smacked in the face by some unruly little trees, but in the end, I was relatively happy with this composition.
I decided to go with a pretty dark look when editing this image. I really wanted to emphasize the deep shadows and bright highlights, and make sure that the chair and lone paintball strike were the focal points. To achieve this, I selectively applied the ‘Midnight’ and ‘Tonal Contrast’ filters from Nik Color Efex Pro on top of my usual application of a number of filters in Phototools. My processing for this image was definitely inspired by urbex HDR master, Jacques Gudé (aka fotofreq). If you’re unfamiliar with his work, be sure to check it out!
For this shot I opted to get nice and low and quite close to the end of this broken bench to really make the cracked board the focal point of the image. I also took advantage of the tilt functionality of the TS-E lens to further bring focus to the crack while throwing the rest of the bench out of focus.
Oh, and if you like images being referenced to movie titles, make sure you check out Movie Title Wednesdays from my good buddy Mike Olbinski. His running series is well worth checking out, and he’s already published his own take on ‘Field of Dreams’!
When thinking about the title for this post last night, I realized that a whole lot of my blog/image titles are questions…and I’m not really sure why. Maybe I like the idea of people visiting the image and coming up with their own interesting stories to answer the questions, or maybe it’s just a great gimmick to get people to click on my links 
Either way, I’m sure you’ll see plenty more question marks in my image titles.
I’ve been using onOne’s PhotoTools for a few weeks now, and I absolutely love it for processing HDR photos. I haven’t even come close to experimenting with all the amazing filters available, but I’ve already found a few that I call my favourites. The image below is a combination of about 5 or 6 effects stacked together at various opacities, the most important of which is the ‘Fallout’ filter that I used to give it a bit of that green, post-apocalyptic feel. If you’re looking for something to take your photos to the next level, I’d wholeheartedly recommend giving PhotoTools a try!
