Care for a drink?

Tech Info: HDR from 5 exposures using Nikon D300s on a gorilla pod with Tokinaa 12-24 @22mm, ISO 200 at f/10. Exposures ranging from 1/6 sec to 2 secs
 

Actually I would have if I had some company 😉

This shot was taken en route to Inida last year. Usually most of my friends prefer to have short layovers so that they can reach their destination faster. But due to my back problem, I prefer to have longer layovers. This gives me some time to give the back much needed rest and I pretty much stay in a hotel. Most of the airports have some kind of transit hotel and I’ve used Singapore airport hotel (Ambassador) for majority of my trips and recently during this trip it was the Dubai’s International Hotel in Terminal 3.
 

Hotels have very nice front desk (at least the good ones) and because of the lighting, colors, textures and the design, they make interesting subjects to shoot. This picture was taken at the reception area (yeah they had a bar right there). My initial composition involved a much wider view of this bar, but due to some strange pink/violet colored light at the ceiling, I had to crop it this way.

Since it was a HDR, I used a GorillaPod which was my b’day gift from a friend. A total of 5 exposures ranging from 1/6 of sec to 2 secs were taken. I could have gone for more, but I just wanted to get inside the room and just lay flat 🙂

Processing:

1. Import all the 5 exposures into Lightroom and set basic adjustments.
2. Export them to Photomatix and generate the HDR.
3. Used Detail Enhancer method to tonemap the HDR and import back to Lightroom.
4. Open the tonemapped image in Photoshop, along with one of the darker frames.
5. Masked in the darker frame for some really bright areas and merged them.
6. Added a curves layer for a slight contrast.
7. Resized the image for web and added a smart sharpen layer.
8. Added border and shadow effect, saved it as 8 bit jpeg.
9. Added keywords, metadata through bridge.

Before:

 
After: