The Stockholm Tunnelbana is full of visual surprises if you know how to look for them. It’s amazing to me that so many people breeze through these elaborately built stations on a daily basis without even a second glance. Then again, we as artists tend to look at the world in a completely different way. Having an artistic eye gives us the ability to find interesting things in everyday subjects; subjects that most people just overlook and/or classify as mundane.
So while most see metro stations only as forms of transportation or simple solutions to get from point A to point B, I see them as compositions and angles, colors and textures, moods and emotions. I also like to think that I’ve inspired people —especially in Stockholm— to see these stations as what they were intended to be: Works of art.
This amazing work of nonsymmetrical art is Station Universitetet on the Red Line.
Technical Mumbo Jumbo
Camera: Nikon D800
Lens: 14-24 f/2.8 – Shot at 14mm
Aperture: f/8
ISO: 100
5 Exposures: ? / 0.6 / 1.3 / 2.5 / 5
I know that Photomatix gets a bad wrap now and them but there are a few things that it handles consistently well. One of those things is detail enhancement. So while the DR (dynamic range) in this scene is a bit limited, the wealth of textures is not. And my goal was to punch up the textures as much as possible.
In Photoshop, the Photomatix result was first blended with the original exposure. Then, parts of exposures -2 & +1 were also blended in to bring back some areas of extreme shadow and extreme light.
I applied a slight increase of Tonal Contrast with NIK Color Effects Pro and selectively sharpened the image with NIK Sharpener. Additional selective color, saturation and contrast adjustments were applied using some quick and dirty Luminance Masking.
The 14mm distortion was removed in Adobe Lightroom 4 using the matching lens profile.
