The Old Shed

This nicely weathered little shed stands in a meadow near the Northern railroad line in Luxembourg, not far from a location called Essen, with an old farm, 3 horses and a lot of milk cows. Since I drive trains on that line often I come along that place in every time of the year, seeing it change with the seasons, so the wish grew in me to go and make photos of it one day. Yesterday that day had come for me. But I will return to make more photos because I was there in late afternoon as the sun was standing behind the shed. Fortunately the sun had been hidden by clouds most of the time so there was no big negative effect on the exposure measuring of the iPhone. But returning in the early morning sure will give all advantages one can have from the rising sun and maybe even some misty meadows.


Camera App: ProHDR


Additional Apps used:


ProHDR - to process the initially made HDR a second time, using it together with the lighter picture taken to produce the initial HDR. I did that because I wasn't satisfied with the outcome of the first HDR.
Filterstorm - for gamma correction.
Dynamic Light - to enhance the HDR effect. I used the normal settings here.
Filterstorm - for noise reduction, slight re-sharpening and desaturation. Then adding a thin white border with 5% width.
Pic Grunger - because I love the old wood for texture. It makes very nice frames. However, despite setting the effect slider to zero and using the Block Party style, there was a very negative effect on the clouds. Part of the sky turned out noisy with ugly brown and black spots while the rest of the picture remained quite untouched by the effect. I didn't like that.
Filterstorm again - to add a 10% white frame to the wooden frame created in Pic Grunger.


I then plaid around with A+ Signature to add a very small watermark for copyright protection but found it very difficult to get it properly aligned. Here, the tiny iPhone screen turns out to be very disadvantageous but since I still have no iPad and there is still no zoom in function in A+ Signature. However the makers of A+ Signature are very cooperative which lets me hope they will add a zoom in function with a future update. I decided to switch over to PhotoShop for doing just that work as well as correcting the frame problem. As for the frame I just cut out the ugly picture from it to insert the original picture I previously used for framing. That way I could use the wooden frame with a clean picture. I then also added my handwritten signature in PhotoShop.


So you iPhoneographers out there please forgive me for not processing this picture on the iPhone only. Placing a tiny signature on a small screen with no zoom in function is really to imprecise to satisfy my needs.


If you got questions or suggestions please feel free to leave your comment. This was my very first HDR done with the iPhone and I'm quite satisfied with the outcome of it. I used my tripod together with a self-build iPhone-to-tripod-adapter. I build that adapter myself because I did not want to wait for a commercial adapter to arrive in a few weeks only since no such adapters can be found in local stores here in Luxembourg.