Fatal Attraction

The story behind the image: a friend of mine has recently "come out" as transitioning from male to female. This photograph is something of an alternative illustration of that; a highly technical image portraying the female aspect dominating the male.

This image is a HDR panorama with multiple exposures of the same subject. Eighteen exposures (six sets of -3/0/+3 exposures) were first HDR merged in Photoshop, then tone-mapped with a compression function to 16bpp depth. Hugin was used for the panorama stitch, resulting in another 16bpp TIFF which was then tone-mapped and post-processed using Aperture.

A tripod was used panning up and down (the 17mm lens was pretty wide, and the angle set very low to the ground), but I didn't have a panorama head, so the stitch isn't pixel-perfect but still gives the "Quake level" feel with the angles in the shot. A little use of the clone tool was required to sort out where the sunlight fell as the shadows moved while Amy changed outfits.

The location (Derwent Tower, also known as Dunston Rocket) was a bit of a mission to find and — we were disappointed to find — is now a demolition site. This actually placed where we had wanted to shoot behind an eight-foot-high fence. We thought about jumping it, but security cameras and a Portakabin with lights and an open door suggested our presence would be noticed and unwelcome. Instead we opted to shoot from a building opposite which was also inaccessible: a small amount of civil trespass was required to get to this spot.

The scratches on my wrists and the hours spent rendering this image out were totally worth it.