***For best results, click on image to view on black***
As you head North on McNab Street in downtown Hamilton, Ontario, you eventually need to cross the railway tracks serving the downtown train station as well as being a major East-West rail traffic route. On McNab, the solution was to go under, not over, the tracks. Over time, the underpass has been decorated by local artists, although perhaps not in an official manner. Sitting near the railway station, I assume that the artistic community felt a greeting to visitors was in order and hence the title of this image. The title is taken from the text in the yellow 'box' centred above the stairs which greets all with 'Welcome To Hamilton' and then in a very helpful manner, provides a number of arrows indicating directions from that point to some of the major destinations in the core. Over time the walls of the tunnel itself have been decorated and tagged and the whole tunnel has become a bit of a surreal entrance to the downtown core. Welcome to Hamilton. - JW
This image made use of an HDR-processed version of the original image although, since that involved only a single image is strictly speaking tone-mapped rather than a full HDR
The image was made from a single photo captured using a hand-held Nikon D5000 fitted with a Nikkor 18-105mm VR lense set to 18mm, ISO400, Aperture priority mode, f/7.1, ISO400, 1/8 sec. HDR processing to make use of the tone-mapping stage was done using Luminance/Qtpfsgui with settings as indicated below. PP in GIMP: the tone-mapped version was loaded as the lower layer and the original image as the upper layer, the opacity of the original was set to 50% to allow some of the shadow detail of the tone-mapped layer to supplement the highlight areas of the original giving a better overall look while retaining much of the lower noise of the original, created a new layer from the result, applied tone curve tool to get better tonality, increased contrast slightly, boosted saturation overall slightly, sharpened, added fine black and white frame, added bar and text on left, scaled to 1024 wide for posting.
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1DSC_2526_mcnabunderpassgraffitiTM50pcorigadjbarsigx1024_pregamma_1_mantiuk_contrast_mapping_0.5_saturation_factor_1.4_detail_factor_1
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Qtpfsgui 1.9.3 tonemapping parameters:
Operator: Mantiuk
Parameters:
Contrast Mapping factor: 0.5
Saturation Factor: 1.4
Detail Factor: 1
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PreGamma: 1
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